The exceptional commercial success of many Southeast Asians of Chinese origin has generated much contemporary debate about the cultural or social basis of that success. This book shows that those questions have long roots in Indonesia. Dutch colonial officials in the nineteenth century expressed...

This paper takes advantage of the exogenous phasing of direct elections in districts and applies the double-difference estimator to measure impacts on (i) human development outcomes and (ii) the pattern of public spending and revenue generation at the district level. The analysis reveals that...