In South Korea and Taiwan, public policy and private enterprise have collaborated to create post-war miracles of economic development. Karl J. Fields examines the institutions most important to the two success stories - powerful business groups and state bureaucracies. Drawing on extensive empirical research, Fields offers a new explanation for the similarities and differences in the organization of big business in two of East Asia's "mini-dragons.".

While huge family-owned conglomerates, the chaebol, have dominated Korean business, smaller guanxiqiye, interlocking family-based firms, have proved equally formidable in Taiwan. In his account of business-state relations, forms of financing, and the organization of trading companies in the two cases, Fields rejects both cultural-reductionist and rational choice explanations for differences between the two countries.

He offers instead an innovative institutional approach that focuses on the complex linkages between social networks and political power.