96-J-15. Nakanishi, Toru, "Community and Kindred System in Economic Development: A Case Study of the Philippines and the Other Asian Countries", June 1996.

The purpose of this discussion paper is to present a hypothesis that compadrazgo, a ritual kinship relations in the Philippines, could retard her economic development.

In the early stage of economic development, the community has some important roles of substituting or complementing the prema-tured market or command economy. According to Ishikawa [1990], these are: (1) redistribution of income, (2) safety net (i.e., social security system), (3) scale economies, and (4) regulation of monopoly. From this point of view, the East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea or Taiwan have their own `tightly structured' communities based on their uni-lineal kindred systems, which contribute to the stable agricultural development and smooth rural - urban resource allocation.

And it seems to me that another important role of community is to lower the enforcement cost in the policy implementation through its own strictly vertical command system. The communities of East Asian countries support the government interventions to function efficiently as the command economy in the early stage of development process.

On the other hand the four Southeast Asian countries; Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, have their own `loosely structured' communities based on their bilineal kindred systems. In these systems, in spite of their potentially strong recognition of the necessity of the rigid command economy because of the lack of community functions, the enforcement cost in the command economy may be high, and the government has found difficulty in playing its own role compared with the cases of the East Asian countries.

Furthermore, in the Philippines, the compa-drazgo, a type of fictive kinship relations in the Roman Catholic, has played a role of incompletely substituting or complementing the prematured market economy and has hampered the government interventions. And this social system can strengthen and extend the vertical bilateral social relation, such as a patron-client relation beyond community, and contribute to lose social ladder and to fail to give social recognition of the necessity of the command economy in the Philippines.