Review of Bryan Cheang, Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State: Hong Kong and Singapore’s Post-War Development (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, hardcover 2022, softcover 2023).

What lessons should policymakers draw from non-Western countries that have achieved prosperity? The question feels urgent and, at times, deceptively simple. One might expect economic growth to be a technical challenge—about institutions, capital, labor, incentives. But as Bryan Cheang’s Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State demonstrates, the deeper question is not just how countries grow, but what kind of societies they become in the process. His book invites a long-overdue complication of the so-called East Asian miracle by closely comparing Hong Kong and Singapore—two often-overlooked case studies that share key institutional features but diverge sharply in outcomes.

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