My work in political economy examines the interaction between economic systems, political power, law, institutions, society and historical development. I am particularly interested in why institutions function effectively in some environments but poorly in others; how formal legal and political structures interact with informal social institutions; and how wealth, political authority and social organisation affect economic development and the capacity of states to govern.
Although much of my published scholarship has used taxation as its empirical setting, the underlying questions have generally been considerably broader. Taxation provides an unusually revealing point at which the state, economy and society meet. It raises questions about property and wealth, economic incentives, redistribution, governmental capacity, corruption, administrative power, rule of law, international relations and the legitimacy of government itself.
My approach is therefore best described as historical and comparative political economy, drawing upon economics, political science, sociology, law and history.
Economic Theory and Economic Behaviour
My formal education in economics began within my Bachelor of Commerce, which included both microeconomics and macroeconomics, and continued through postgraduate study of taxation and tax policy. My BA in Asian Studies followed a politics stream and included specialist study of changing global political economy, the East Asian economic miracle and subsequent financial crisis, Chinese politics, contemporary China and Chinese social history.
An important theme in my subsequent research has been the limitations of treating economic actors as socially isolated rational individuals.
My PhD, completed at UNSW in 2010, examined the relationship between social institutions and economic and legal institutions, drawing particularly upon institutional economics and economic sociology. It began from the proposition, associated with Douglass North, that institutions are fundamental to explaining differences in economic performance, while also drawing upon Mark Granovetter’s conception of economic behaviour as socially embedded.
Using China as its principal case, I examined how informal relationships, families, business networks, property arrangements, social obligations and governmental structures alter the operation of conventional economic and legal models. The broader proposition was that economic behaviour cannot be adequately understood independently of the institutional and social environment in which it occurs.
Politics and Economic Power
Politics has formed part of my study of economic systems since my undergraduate Asian Studies work in the 1990s.
My research on China has examined the unusual relationship between a powerful central state and substantially decentralised economic governance. I have considered how local political authorities, business interests and central government interact, and how significant local administrative discretion can coexist with central political control.
My doctoral research, for example, examined evidence that China’s decentralised governance arrangements could simultaneously produce outcomes conventionally characterised as inconsistent or institutionally weak while contributing to China’s extraordinary economic development.
This raises a recurring question in my work: what makes government effective? Formal institutional characteristics associated with successful developed economies do not necessarily explain economic outcomes elsewhere. Conversely, economic success does not necessarily establish that the political and legal institutions producing it are desirable, sustainable or readily transferable.
My more recent work extends these questions to democratic and authoritarian political systems, including Russia, Ukraine and the wider post-Soviet region.
Economic Transition and Development
I have studied economic transition and development for more than twenty-five years.
My early research included work on overseas Chinese business networks and the ability of Chinese commercial networks to operate across national boundaries and in environments characterised by comparatively weak formal institutions. I subsequently taught Chinese business enterprise at UNSW and developed teaching and research concerning Chinese investment law, taxation and institutional development during China’s transition from a planned economy.
My PhD developed this substantially further. It examined contemporary Chinese institutions as products of interactions between longstanding Chinese social institutions, the experience of communist government, post-1978 economic transition and China’s integration into the international economic system.
An important conclusion was that institutional modernisation cannot simply be equated with Westernisation. Formal institutions transplanted from one successful economy do not necessarily perform identically when placed within another social and political environment.
My comparative work on Mainland China, Singapore and Hong Kong has provided particularly useful examples because these economies possess substantial historical, cultural and regional connections but markedly different legal, political and administrative institutions. My publications have examined how their fiscal and international economic institutions developed in different directions and what those differences reveal about development.
Functional Institutions
The distinction between institutions that exist formally and institutions that actually function is one of the most persistent themes in my scholarship.
My research distinguishes formal institutions (including legislation, courts and administrative organisations) from the informal or social institutions through which people actually organise economic and social activity.
These systems interact. Informal institutions may compensate for weak formal institutions and permit sophisticated economic activity to occur without the institutional infrastructure normally regarded as necessary. But successful informal substitutes may themselves weaken incentives to develop strong formal institutions. My PhD identified precisely this feedback problem: extensive reliance upon informal institutions can weaken the formal institutional environment, while weakness in formal institutions increases the value of relying upon informal ones.
This has led me to question institutional reform programmes that concentrate upon importing formally successful laws without adequately considering the environment within which those laws must function.
Rule of Law
My interest in institutional effectiveness necessarily involves the rule of law.
I have examined the distinction between government through formal legal rules and government through administrative discretion, relationships and political authority. My work has considered whether economic systems can function successfully despite relatively weak conventional rule-of-law institutions, and whether alternative governance mechanisms that facilitate economic development can subsequently become obstacles to the development of stronger impersonal institutions.
My publications include comparative work on the rule-of-law implications of Australian and Chinese tax administration and research with Ian Murray on the relationship between rule of law, institutional weakness and administrative leadership.
These questions extend considerably beyond taxation. The fundamental political-economy issue is what actually constrains the exercise of state and private power.
Institutional Reform in China
My work on Chinese institutional development has not been confined to academic observation.
In 2002 I worked through an AusAID-supported project in a small team engaging directly with senior officials of the Budget Affairs Commission of China’s National People’s Congress on reform of China’s taxation system. Much of my contribution concerned the development of China’s enterprise taxation, and significant elements of the reform direction on which we worked were subsequently realised in the reform of China’s Enterprise Income Tax.
In 2005 I participated in a further institutional-development project supported by the German development organisation GTZ. Working in Beijing with a small group of Chinese academics and German officials, we developed and actually drafted a proposed Basic Tax Law for China.
This was not simply technical tax drafting. The proposed law was constitutional in character: it sought to establish fundamental principles governing taxation and taxpayer rights and therefore to impose legal structure upon the relationship between the fiscal administration and the citizen. We presented the resulting draft to the National People’s Congress. It was not ultimately enacted.
These experiences gave me unusual direct exposure to the practical difficulties of institutional construction in a rapidly transforming state. My CV also records advisory involvement in Chinese corporate tax and tax-administration law development and periods as a visiting scholar in public finance at Xiamen University.
Corruption and Institutional Integrity
I approach corruption primarily as a problem of institutions, incentives and power, rather than simply individual dishonesty.
My early field research in Fujian involved discussions with tax officials about the realities of tax administration and evasion. My PhD subsequently questioned explanations that simply attribute institutional problems to corruption or inadequate formal development. It argued that such explanations may miss underlying interactions between formal institutions, social relationships and economic behaviour.
My later research included work funded by the Asian Development Bank concerning corruption. My published work with John Fraser examined the conceptual difficulties involved in applying foreign anti-corruption law within the Chinese institutional and taxation environment.
This work raises a wider question central to political economy: when do relationships between economic actors and government facilitate economic activity, when do they become corruption, and when does private economic power begin to capture the institutions intended to regulate it?
Leadership and Governance
I have also examined whether leadership can substitute for institutional strength.
My research with Ian Murray brought theories of administrative leadership into the analysis of legal and economic institutions. This produced an important paradox. Strong leadership may enable an organisation or state to function despite deficiencies in its formal institutions. Yet dependence upon leadership and discretionary authority can itself inhibit the emergence of impersonal institutions capable of functioning independently of particular leaders.
This relationship between leadership, state capacity and institutional constraint has implications well beyond tax administration and is particularly relevant to comparative analysis of authoritarian, transitional and developing political systems.
Public Finance
Public finance provides an important empirical foundation for my political-economy research.
I have worked extensively on the capacity of states to raise revenue, the economic and distributive consequences of taxation, international allocation of taxing rights and the relationship between fiscal systems and economic development.
My experience includes visiting positions in public finance in China and Taiwan, engagement with the Korean Institute of Public Finance, extensive teaching of senior Australian and Korean tax administrators, and involvement in Chinese fiscal institutional development.
Since 2015 I have also served as an expert for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP). My work has particularly considered the position of developing countries within international tax arrangements and the consequences when international economic rules are principally designed by more powerful developed states.
My 2019 article on the interests of developing countries in OECD/G20-led international income-tax initiatives is representative of this concern.
Public finance in this sense is inseparable from political economy: who finances government, who bears taxation, which state obtains revenue from transnational economic activity, and who determines the international rules governing that distribution?
Wealth, Property and Distribution
Questions about who actually owns and controls economic resources have appeared throughout my research.
My doctoral work examined informal assets and liabilities, extended families, informal economic entities and situations in which formal legal ownership does not necessarily correspond with substantive economic relationships. It therefore questioned whether legal concepts developed around individual ownership and formally constituted entities adequately capture the organisation of wealth in all societies.
My subsequent work on international investment, multinational enterprises, trusts, offshore structures and international taxation has continued to examine the movement, control and taxation of wealth across legal and national boundaries.
This provides a foundation for my more recent interest in wealth concentration, oligarchy and the conversion of economic resources into political power.
Oligarchy and State Capture
My current work extends this institutional analysis into the political economies of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet states.
I am interested in oligarchy not simply as the possession of extreme wealth, but as a particular relationship between wealth and political power. Control of strategically important economic assets may generate political influence; political influence can then protect control of those assets. Under some conditions this relationship can develop into state capture or into systems in which political and economic power become difficult to separate.
My current research considers the transnational character of some post-Soviet economic and political networks and the extent to which functioning democratic institutions, independent legal institutions and genuine rule of law can threaten political-economic systems dependent upon privileged access to state power.
This research also informs my developing analysis of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while recognising that economic interests form only one part of a conflict that also requires historical, sociological, national, imperial and geopolitical explanation.
Functional Democracy
My Democracy Dysfunction research asks a related institutional question: what does it mean for democracy actually to function?
Holding elections is not itself sufficient to answer that question. Democratic accountability depends upon citizens being capable of withdrawing political support in response to corruption, institutional failure, poor government or other outcomes.
I am investigating circumstances in which powerful identities (national, ethnic, religious, cultural or ideological) can weaken that accountability mechanism. Where political allegiance becomes attached to an overriding identity, voters may become considerably less willing to change political support in response to governmental performance. Political actors may consequently acquire opportunities to behave in ways that a more responsive electoral environment would discipline.
The project therefore brings political economy together with political sociology, psychology, history and law. Its central concern remains institutional: why does democratic accountability work more effectively in some circumstances than others, and how can apparently democratic systems become dysfunctional without ceasing formally to be democracies?
Propaganda, Misinformation and Political Manipulation
My current research on Russian influence, political manipulation, identity politics and propaganda examines the informational mechanisms through which political power can exploit existing social divisions.
I am particularly interested in why propaganda succeeds in some environments but encounters resistance in others. Propaganda does not operate upon populations without histories, identities or institutions. Political narratives can exploit pre-existing conceptions of nation, class, ethnicity, historical grievance, political authority and external enemies.
This research includes comparative consideration of Russia and Ukraine and the extent to which their different historical experiences, national narratives, political institutions and social development may help explain different responses to political authority and manipulation.
A related project considers the intellectual legacy of Marxism and conflict-based political analysis, including the extent to which analytical structures originally centred upon economic class have influenced subsequent political frameworks organised around other forms of group identity and conflict. I am interested particularly in how such frameworks can subsequently be used or manipulated by political actors rather than in reducing contemporary identity politics to a single intellectual origin.
Contemporary social media, algorithmic communication and artificial intelligence make these questions increasingly important because they radically increase the capacity to identify, target and amplify social divisions.
Transnational Regions
My political-economy work has long questioned the assumption that the nation-state is necessarily the correct unit of analysis.
My research into overseas Chinese business networks began in the late 1990s. I subsequently examined how kinship, language, migration, social networks, investment and commerce can produce economically meaningful regions crossing formal national borders.
My PhD explored Chinese transnationalism and the economic relationships linking China with Chinese communities elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Its fieldwork in Fujian was particularly appropriate because of the region’s longstanding economic and social connections with Taiwan, Singapore and Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia.
My subsequent ASEAN research explicitly addressed South-East Asian transnationalism, regional integration and the relationship between national fiscal institutions and emerging economic regions.
This earlier work provides an important conceptual foundation for my present interest in transnational political and economic networks in the former Soviet region.
Empire, History and Path Dependence
Finally, I regard history as integral to political economy rather than merely background to it.
My research on China has considered how contemporary institutions have been shaped by imperial government, traditional social organisation, communist rule, economic transition and integration into the international economy. The PhD expressly questioned assumptions that modernisation would inevitably cause distinctive Chinese social institutions simply to converge upon Western models.
I now apply a similarly historical approach to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. My developing work considers Russian imperial and Soviet institutional inheritances, Ukrainian political and national development, contested historical narratives, oligarchic structures and the relationship between empire, national identity and contemporary political power.
The underlying concept is path dependence. Contemporary political economies begin neither from a blank slate nor simply from the formal constitutional arrangements visible today. Historical institutions affect distributions of wealth and power, social expectations, political identities and perceptions of legitimate authority. These inherited structures can continue to influence political and economic possibilities long after the institutions that originally produced them have formally disappeared.
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Political Economy
Across these different areas, the central question in my work is remarkably consistent:
How do economic power, political authority, law, institutions, society and history interact to determine whether political and economic systems function effectively?
My work approaches this question from an unusually broad base. I have formal academic training across economics and accounting, politics and Asian Studies, taxation, law, psychology and linguistics. I have combined this with professional practice in accounting, taxation and law and with direct experience of institutional-development work, legislative reform, international organisations and government administration.
Taxation has frequently provided the empirical setting for this research because taxation exposes some of the most fundamental relationships within a political economy: between citizen and state, property and public power, formal law and administrative reality, national sovereignty and international institutions, and economic wealth and its distribution.
The subject of my research, however, has increasingly been the larger system within which those relationships occur.
I therefore describe my principal interdisciplinary field as historical and comparative political economy: the study of how wealth, power, institutions and society interact over time, why those relationships differ between societies, and what makes political and economic institutions function (or fail to function) in practice.
