I think one notable exception to the roster of Asian authoritarian miracles was the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos. He consolidated his rule over the country by declaring martial law in 1972, citing a potential Communist insurrection and a general breakdown in law and order. While the move was not exactly directed by the United States (they assessed the Communist threat as having been exaggerated by Marcos), they welcomed the dictatorship for reasons similar to your OP: other autocrats like Suharto, Park and LKY were using similar methods to raise their countries out of their “third-world” situations.

The issue with the interventionism of the Marcos regime, however, is that it was characterized by what is now infamously termed as “crony capitalism”, or the flourishing of private enterprise not through the free market but by collusion with regulatory bureaucrats. In order to lead many of the state-run corporations that were an integral part of his developmentalist regime, Marcos installed many of his close friends and political allies not necessarily for their genuine competence, but for their personal ties and loyalty towards him. This essentially allowed him to enrich himself and his allies via the systematic “looting” of the entire Philippine economy with little guarantee of any benefits trickling down down to the working or middle classes.

One example of this was the case of Roberto Benedicto. Benedicto was Marcos’s crony in charge of the National Sugar Trading Corporation or Nasutra, which was the Marcos regime’s company that controlled the Philippines’ sugar industry, particularly on the sugarcane-growing island of Negros. In the mid-1970s, Benedicto anticipated a sharp increase in world sugar prices and “hoarded” sugar by way of overproduction, but faced a crisis when sugar prices actually collapsed in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Benedicto, of course, was not going to tank the lost revenues himself, and secured a 14-billion-peso emergency bailout from the government while passing on the losses to other planters and workers. Hundreds of thousands of layoffs of sugar workers ensued, and as a result Negros became the site of one of the Philippines’ worst famines on record and thus fertile ground for a burgeoning Communist insurgency.

Another example of state-run mismanagement was the case of Marcos crony Danding Cojuangco and his control over the Philippine coconut industry. In order to generate funds for Cojuangco, Marcos imposed a “coco levy” from Filipino coconut farmers for Cojuangco to use to buy up around 80% of all coconut processing mills in the country. Because Cojuangco was essentially in control of a monopsony, his mills could demand criminally low prices for coconuts from Filipino farmers to sell at a profit. As a result, the Communist insurgency also grew in coconut-producing regions in Bicol and Mindanao.

In addition to monopolies, Marcos’s regime was particularly characterized by semi-Keynesian government spending particularly through an ambitious infrastructure program, which necessitated extremely liquid foreign reserves and heavy borrowing from institutions like the IMF. These were used on flashy infrastructural projects like the San Juanico Bridge and the Philippine Heart Center, and cultural projects like the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Manila Film Center. The issue with these projects was that in addition to some of them being somewhat displaced as government responses (the Philippine Lung Center, for example, was built with funds supposedly for a tuberculosis epidemic), they essentially relied on debt-driven growth to be financed. By 1983, the country’s total debt was at around $25 billion, putting the Philippines at one of the ten most indebted countries in the world at the time. This caused a sharp decrease of wages and unemployment as well as runaway inflation, leading the Communists to expand their reach into the unions of disaffected laborers in the urban areas. Even after the Marcos regime was overthrown in 1986, the succeeding administrations of Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos had to deal with debt repayments taking up around 40% of the country’s national budget. The last series of repayments technically ended in 2007, and even then it can be argued that the Marcos regime set the Philippine economy back two decades or so.

The issue, I think, lies within the inability of the Philippine state to independently regulate the vested interests that want to take advantage of it. The Philippine economy has been characterized as “rent-seeking” instead of “profit-seeking”: rent is what economists call extractive economic advantages given to certain parties that have no inherent benefit to the rest of the economy: in short, they gain simply because they are there at the right place and at the right time. This leads to people who a.) have preexisting personal connections with bureaucrats or b.) already have enough money to bribe bureaucrats as the primary drivers of the economy, thus leading into a system which favors the entrenched wealthy and well-connected as opposed to people who will genuinely run businesses well. This weakness of the central state arguably has its roots with Spanish and American colonialism, where a united Philippines would not be in the interests of imperialist powers.

Other countries like Korea, Japan and Singapore, I think, were able to more efficiently and effectively manage their economies to be genuinely productive and capitalist, relying on returned gains for national development instead of a short-term potential for looting. On the other hand, this lack of a penchant for capitalist “efficiency” in place of crony capitalism has since proved to be an endemic issue for Philippine development.

Sources:

- State and Society in the Philippines by Abinales and Amoroso

- Some Are Smarter Than Others by Ricardo Manapat (the definitive reference for the Marcos economy)

- Marcos Martial Law: Never Again by Raissa Robles

- Waltzing With A Dictator by Raymond Bonner

- Anarchy of Families by Alfred McCoy

- The National or the Social? Problems of nation-building in post-WW2 Philippines by Kathleen Weekley

- Political Economy of Fiscal Policy in the Philippines by Manuel F. Montes