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Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines. By Paul D. Hutchcroft. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. 278p. $39.95.
Paul Hutchcroft seeks to explain the Philippines' longstanding "development bog." He attributes it to the country's system of booty capitalism, which he examines in the particular area of private commercial banking.
Patrimonial systems, Hutchcroft notes, following Max Weber, by failing to provide calculability in the political sphere, impede the development of more advanced forms of capitalist accumulation. But there are different types of patrimonialism. The Philippines presents a case of "oligarchic patrimonialism." Unlike administrative patrimonialism, in which the primary beneficiaries are members of a state bureaucracy, the oligarchic variety enables a politically influential business elite to extract privileges from a largely incoherent bureaucracy. Such a system need not decline as economic growth proceeds, for that growth by itself may only strengthen the existing oligarchs, and these have little incentive to press for a more legal-rational political order that deprives them of their special privileges.
In a useful historical section (pp. 23-30), Hutchcroft explains how the Philippine oligarchy became dominant over the state. Under both Spanish and American rule, wealthy land owning families, many of part-Chinese descent, emerged in the provinces alongside a weak and understaffed colonial administration. When elections were introduced early in the century, these families won control of the legislature. But there emerged no countervailing bureaucratic-aristocratic elite, such as in Thailand, capable of defending the state's resources against plunder by these families. From the beginning, such self-interested oligarchs have pressured public officials to do their bidding.
The remedy for the Philippines, Hutchcroft believes, is not more "state bashing,"...