Commercial Power Centers in Emerging Markets

As the ongoing Asian crises underscore, policymaking and policies are becoming less the exclusive purview of governments and more the outcome of a complex process in which diverse groups participate actively, with varying degrees of influence. A commercial power center (CPC) is any group, combination, or coalition that seeks to influence the design and implementation of government economic policies to suit its interests. This analytic framework is used to assess the changing politics of economic policymaking–to identify new groups with stakes and older ones that may be losing influence, and to evaluate their interaction in the making of government policy. The influence of selected CPCs in emerging markets matters for both what analysts look at and how they view those new targets. Asia’s financial crisis, which struck as this project was in its final stages, drove home that lesson. The authors illustrate their methodology by examining four countries–Mexico, Turkey, China, and Indonesia–that are in transition and that vary widely from one another.