Booty capitalism / oligarchic patrimonialism

Paul Hutchcroft’s name for the Philippine arrangement. A politically influential business elite extracts privileges from a bureaucracy too incoherent to resist. He distinguishes it carefully from the reverse case, where a patrimonial state preys on business, and the direction matters, because the two produce different diseases and need different cures.

His evidence base is banking, and the results he traces are low savings, misallocated credit and recurring crises. The prescription follows straight from the diagnosis and is the reason this framework earns its place in the course: if the problem is an incoherent state facing an organised elite, then the fix is building a state, not electing better people into the one that exists.

Source: Paul D. Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines, Cornell University Press, 1998. Free to borrow on the Internet Archive.

First used in: 1.8 · Four days, and then the same families came back