Organized Corruption, State Business Relations and the Political Economy of Development
Speaker: Professor Edmund Terence Gomez
Date: 10 October 2026
Time: 2pm (Singapore Time)
Venue: The Pod, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street, Singapore 188064
Full Abstract:
State-business relations present a persistent developmental paradox: political alliances that accelerate capital accumulation may also institutionalize and reproduce corruption, eroding the legal and administrative foundations on which development depends. This paradox is examined through the scholarship of Professor Syed Hussein Alatas on corruption and affirmative action, extended through engagement with other theorists of corruption.
When Malaysia’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was conceived, Alatas criticized business-based affirmative action as ill-suited to enterprise development, treating affirmative action and corruption as distinct issues. As privatization gave rise to a complex ecosystem of government-linked enterprises, these domains became institutionally inseparable, producing what is termed here “reproductive corruption”: a process in which policies and their implementing institutions allocate rents in ways that generate political relationships that, in turn, reproduce those policies and institutions as mechanisms of further rent allocation. Corruption thus becomes not merely an outcome of institutional capture, but a mechanism through which captured institutions reproduce themselves.
The argument traces this process across successive Malaysian policy regimes: the NEP, privatization, the post-1997 reorganization of government-linked companies, and Jana Wibawa. These cases show how institutions established for developmental or redistributive purposes can be redirected toward particularistic allocation without ceasing to perform their formal functions. Policy and institution thereby become simultaneously functional and captured, each sustaining the other’s reproduction.
The Malaysian case suggests a broader dynamic: corruption need not be an external distortion of governance but can become embedded in the reproduction of development strategy. Development can thus contain the institutional possibility of its own decay.
