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Studwell, who was in Bangkok on Monday to promote his book, said he decided to focus on Asia's well-known billionaires in his overview of South-East Asia's economic experience as a "sexy" vehicle for getting readers interested in an otherwise not-so-sexy topic.
South-East Asia's economic miracle went bust in 1997, and the region has since been overshadowed by the high-growth economies of China and India.
In the course of his three years of research for the book, Studwell discovered insights about the region's "godfathers" of business, starting with their sex lives.
"They do have enormously rapacious sex lives," Studwell said. "I didn't know that so many 80-year-old men had sex lives before I researched this book."
Studwell, former editor of the China Economic Quarterly who said his book has irked several of its subjects, was also surprised to learn that many of the myths behind the 40 to 50 families that have dominated the economies of South-East Asia and Hong Kong in the post-World War II era were myths.
"I set out expecting to find some rags to riches stories, but in the course of doing the research, I was struck by how few rags-to-riches stories there are," Studwell said at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand
While Asian dictators such as the Philippines' Fidel Marcos and Indonesia's Suharto created a crop of "rags to riches" entrepreneurs from South-East Asia's ethnic Chinese communities, the vast majority of the region's billionaires married into wealth or inherited it, Studwell concluded in his book.
For instance, Li Ka-Shing, Hong Kong's property tycoon, got his entry into business by marrying a first cousin who was from a wealthy Hong Kong business family.
Thailand's telecommunications tycoon and former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who cultivated a "rags to riches" persona for political purposes, also came from a fairly well-to-do business family.
What most Asian business godfathers have in common is political connections and a government concession that formed their core cash flow, such as Thaksin's concession to run one of Thailand's first cellphone services, Studwell said.
His book criticised South-East Asian governments for failing to create economic environments that encourage technological innovations and global companies, preferring to rely on their handful of "merchant capitalists" instead.
Looking to the future, Studwell recommended that the four largest economies in South-east Asia - Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand - form a common market and put up trade barriers against imports to encourage technological innovations in the region and the nurturing of global companies, much as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have done.
"They should either leave Singapore out of the market or at least make sure it is playing a constructive role, such as by providing more information on capital flows, rather than just sitting on their island like a giant money-laundering mat," he said.
- Sapa-dpa
