#149: Bookshelf

Thanks to a very good friend, I got hold of Lee Kwan Yew's The Singapore Story. Although I am not even half way through the book, Lee Kwan Yew's economic and political policies in making Singapore South-East Asia's financial center is very similar to Nursultan Nazarbaev's policies of making Kazakhstan a first-world country by 2030. Policy similarities, especially the rhetoric of putting economic developing and stability as priority and arguing for the Asiatic way in democracy building, are striking.

Also, while looking through The Economist's list of books of the year 2007, I came across Swedish economist Anders Aslund's new book titled How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. He was the adviser to Kyrgyzstan's first President Askar Akaev, who fled the country following the March 2005 events. It would be very interesting to read what he has to say about Central Asia. In an article to MSNBC in October 2006, he said: "One can say that half a billion to $1 billion was probably what the [Akaevs] family amassed."