provided diagram as monetary and macro-pruden- tial policy (which should manage inflation and fi- nancial stability) on the shoulders of exchange rate management and capital flow management. The latter would seek to minimise exchange rate volatility and maintain foreign exchange reserves, promoting financial deepening and minimising ex- ternal sector risks. The final chapter points out the difficulty of managing and understanding flows through a complex network of financial institutions interacting with each other—however, the pro- posals for interweaving and monitoring macro- prudential stability and price stability as put in the Indonesian chapter particularly point to a need to understand the far greater complexity in the net- work between the financial sector and the real economy that it is designed to serve. Overall, this book provides a useful overview of the thinking around monetary policy implementa- tion in the post-GFC period from the perspective of economists from the Asian region. In this, it has significant value, as the experiences of 1997–98 in East Asia directly coloured the response and pre- paredness of policy makers in the region to the 2008–09 crisis. The most useful chapters are the country-specific papers, which provide a coherent overview of the evolution of policy making in the area. The analysis presented in this volume and other papers that compare the Asian crisis with the more recent GFC and European debt crisis crys- tallise a feature that is somewhat missing from the current discussion—perhaps being the crucible of shocks that causes an international crisis is inher- ently more costly than being on the periphery and has rather less to do with whether a country has an emerging or developed financial sector. There is no doubt the book provides a useful stimulate for future research and an excellent background resource that can be recommended to graduate students and researchers wishing to begin to un- derstand the views on policy development during this period in Asia. Mardi Dungey University of Tasmania The Myanmar Economy: Its Past, Present, and Prospects Konosuke Odaka (ed) Springer, 2016 Pp. 239. ISBN 13:9784431557340 Japan was much admired as a model for the rest of Asia during the colonial era prior to World War II. The young leaders of the independence movement in Burma, led by Aung San and his ‘Thirty Comrades’, sought support for their struggle from Japan and enthusiastically allied themselves with the forces that drove the British out of Burma in 1942, before becoming disillusioned and assisting the return of the British and Allied armies in 1945. Despite this fraught history, relations between Japan and newly-independent Burma have generally been very close and friendly ever since. Japan provided not only reparations but generous aid, loans, and direct foreign investment, and trade relations have been at significant levels. Japanese researchers have been particularly active in carrying out field studies of agriculture and industry. It is therefore with considerable interest that any informed reader will approach the present volume, sponsored, and published by the Japan International Cooperation Agency. The first two chapters of the book, by the editor himself and Asuka Mizuno, respectively, are useful attempts to provide the historical background for the more contemporary focus of the rest of the volume. Particularly welcome is the attention devoted to the ideas and influence of two great scholars, the British administrator and lifelong friend of Burma, J.S. Furnivall and the distin- guished economist Hla Myint, famous throughout the world for his contributions to welfare econom- ics, development, and international trade theory. The first chapter is unfortunately marred by what seem to be translation errors. An example is the reference to what is called the ‘two-tier ’ society of the Dutch scholar J.H. Boeke, when what is meant is of course the ‘dualistic’ or ‘dual’ society, as opposed to Furnivall’s concept of the ‘plural’ soci- ety. Hla Myint is at one point referred to as the ‘right hand man’ of Furnivall, an egregious mischaracterisation of the relations between the two. Furnivall’s well-known study of the early British administration in Burma, The Fashioning of Leviathan, is confounded with Hobbes’s treatise and entitled just Leviathan. The statement (p.8) that the leaders of the Thakhin Party ‘were all Western educated’ is not true because none of them studied in the west or even at missionary schools within Burma. Much more serious than these minor mistakes however is the failure to grasp how catastrophic were the effects of the Ne Win ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ period from 1962 to 1988 on the economy, polity, and society of the country. Odaka states (p. 19) ‘—there was no absolute rift between ASIAN-PACIFIC ECONOMIC LITERATURE 114 © 2016 Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd