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Developmental state, n.: the government, motivated by desire for economic advancement, intervenes in industrial affairs. The notion of the developmental state has come under attack in recent years. Critics charge that Japan's success in putting this notion into practice has not been replicated elsewhere, that the concept threatens the purity of freemarket economics, and that its shortcomings have led to financial turmoil in Asia. In this informative and thought-provoking book, a team of distinguished scholars revisits this notion to assess its continuing utility and establish a common vocabulary for debates on these issues. Drawing on new political and economic theories and emphasizing recen...
A comprehensive and original account of the rise of Korea's developmental state, Race to the Swift by Jung-en Woo argues that Korea's industrial growth is neither a miracle nor a cultural mystery, but the outcome of a previously misunderstood political economy.
In evaluating the idea of "Asia Pacific," the book shifts our focus from abstract relationships between capital and commodities to the human interactions that have played a formative part in the region's constitution. The contributors agree that it is these interactions that constitute the region, rather than the physical boundaries of the Pacific.
Japan, South Korea, Mexico, France, and Spain once exercised significant control over the allocation of credit, and used that control to facilitate economic adjustment and industrial development. In the 1980s all that changed. Why and how these states dismantled their activist credit policies is the subject of Capital Ungoverned. The volume brings together five specialists in the economics and politics of these various states to assess the internal and global changes that prompted them to adopt financial liberalization.Comparison reveals the distinctive political and institutional logic that guided liberalization in each country--from the role of a newly dominant capitalist class in Korea to the replacement of state financing by private financing and self-financing in Japan, from the maneuvers of the banking establishment in Spain to attempts to attract foreign capital in Mexico. At the same time, these cases clarify the importance of international factors, in particular the shifts that occurred in U.S. policy as it sought to respond to the effects of uneven growth in the world economy.
Is economic nationalism an outdated phenomenon in light of globalization? Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World demonstrates the enduring, and even heightened, economic significance of national identities and nationalism in the current age. The volume's contributors, pioneers in the reinterpretation of economic nationalism, explore diverse ways in which national identities and nationalism continue to shape contemporary economic policies and processes. The authors examine the question in a range of geographical contexts and issues: European Union food politics, competitiveness strategies in New Zealand, East Asian development strategies, Japanese liberalization, monetary politics in Quebec and Germany, and post-Soviet economic reforms. Together, the cases explore the policy breadth of nationalism. It is not just a "protectionist" ideology but is in fact associated with a wide variety of economic policies, including support for economic liberalization and globalization.
A team of distinguished scholars here reassesses the notion of the developmental state to establish a common vocabulary for debates on the relationship between political institutions and industrial growth. Some observers have blamed the recent global financial crisis on the developmental strategies of East Asian states, whereas others attribute the turmoil to the sudden demise in the 1990s of these very same policies. The authors offer dispassionate accounts of how developmental states have emerged and evolved over the past century, and examine how they really work. The analyses offered in the book look broadly at the combination of political, bureaucratic, and moneyed influences that shape economic life in East Asia and elsewhere. The developmental states are often beset by structural corruption and inefficiency, but they still have a role to play in honing national competitiveness in global markets. The analyses contained in this book do not point to the disappearance of the developmental state, but to its reinvention. Book jacket.
In the summer of 1997, a tidal wave of economic problems swept across Asia. Currencies plummeted, banks failed, GNP stagnated, unemployment soared, and exports stalled. In short, the vaunted "Asian Economic Miracle" became the "Asian Economic Crisis"—with serious repercussions for nations and markets around the world. While the headlines are still fresh, a group of experts on the region presents the first account to focus on the political causes and implications of the crisis. The events of 1997–98 involved not just property values, financial flows, portfolio makeup, and debt ratios, they argue, but also the power relationships that shaped those economic indicators.As they examine the domestic, regional, and international politics that underlay the economic collapse, the authors analyze the reasons why the crisis affected the nations of Asia in radically different ways. The authors also consider whether the crisis indicates a radical change in Asia's economic future.
The growing interconnectedness of national economies and an expanding awareness of global interdependence in the 1990s have generated lively debate over the future of national governance. In a world of mobile capital, are states vital to the social and economic wellbeing of their citizens? A number of changes in the state's domestic and international environment - ranging from regulatory reforms and welfare state restructuring to the proliferation of intergovernmental agreements - have promoted the view that globalisation has a negative impact, compromising state capacities to govern domestically. This book challenges the 'constraints thesis'. Covering vital areas of state activity (welfare, taxation, industrial strategy, and regulatory reform), the contributors focus on a range of issues (finance, trade, technology) faced by both developed and developing countries. The contributors argue that globalisation can enable as well as constrain, and they seek to specify the institutional conditions which sharpen or neutralise the pressures of interdependence.
This is a novel account of social change that supplants conventional understandings of society' and presents a sociology that takes as its main unit of analysis flows through time and across space. Developing a comparative analysis of the UK and US, the new Germany and Japan, Lash and Urry show how restructuration after organized capitalism has its basis in increasingly reflexive social actors and organizations. The consequence is not only the much-vaunted postmodern condition' but also a growth in reflexivity. In exploring this new reflexive world, the authors argue that today's economies are increasingly ones of signs - information, symbols, images, desire - and of space, where both signs and social subjects - refugees, financiers, tourists and "fl[ci]aneurs " - are mobile over ever greater distances at ever greater speeds.