You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) fuels the growth of the global economy. How ICT markets evolve depends on politics and policy, and since the 1950s periodic overhauls of ICT policy have transformed competition and innovation. For example, in the 1980s and the 1990s a revolution in communication policy (the introduction of sweeping competition) also transformed the information market. Today, the diffusion of Internet, wireless, and broadband technology, growing modularity in the design of technologies, distributed computing infrastructures, and rapidly changing business models signal another shift. This pathbreaking examination of ICT from a political economy perspective argues that continued rapid innovation and economic growth require new approaches in global governance that will reconcile diverse interests and enable competition to flourish. The authors (two of whom were architects of international ICT policy reforms in the 1990s) discuss this crucial turning point in both theoretical and practical terms.
Governments today are too often unwilling to intervene in global commerce, and international organizations are too often unable to govern effectively. In their place, firms increasingly cooperate internationally to establish the rules and standards of behavior for themselves and for others, taking on the mantle of authority to govern specific issue areas. Are they stepping into the breach to supply needed collective goods? Or are they organizing themselves in order to prevent governments from interfering in their business? This book explores the meaning of this private international authority, both for theory and policy, through case studies of specific industries, associations, and issue areas in both contemporary and historical perspective. [Contributors include Pamela Burke, Lynn Mytelka and Michel Delapierre, Liora Salter, Susan Sell, Timothy Sinclair, Deborah Spar, and Michael Webb.]
Beginning in 1983, the Mexican government implemented one of the most extensive programs of market-oriented reform in the developing world. Downsizing the State examines a key element of this reform program: the privatization of public firms. Drawing upon interviews with government officials, business executives, and labor leaders as well as data from government archives and corporate documents, MacLeod highlights the difficulties of linking market reforms to improved public welfare. Privatization failed to live up to its promise of raising living standards or decentralizing the economy. Indeed, privatization actually increased the concentration of wealth in Mexico while redirecting the economy toward foreign markets. These findings contribute to theoretical debates regarding state autonomy and the embeddedness of economic action. MacLeod calls into question the autonomy of the Mexican state in its privatization program. He shows that the creation of markets where public firms once dominated has involved both the destruction of social relations and the construction of new relations and institutions to regulate the market.
None
As the world economy is becoming increasingly global in nature, the future of Canada's welfare will directly depend on the country's response and reaction to a wide range of economic regimes which govern the international economy. This volume is an important and timely analysis of past and current Canadian policies toward both the formal and less formal arrangements which regulate such areas as international trade and financial transactions, international service industries, fisheries resources, and the environment. Often influenced by domestic political concerns and its relations with the United States, Canada has, as the authors point out, exhibited a high degree of variation in its responses to these regimes. Canadian Foreign Policy and International Economic Regimes addresses a broad range of foreign economic policies not generally considered in the foreign policy literature. Interdisciplinary in its approach, it will be of interest to those in political science and public policy, economics, and law, as well as to those involved in international business.
Democracies often go to war but almost never against each other. Indeed, "the democratic peace" has become a catchphrase among scholars and even U.S. Presidents. But why do democracies avoid fighting each other? Reliable Partners offers the first systematic and definitive explanation. Examining decades of research and speculation on the subject and testing this against the history of relations between democracies over the last two centuries, Charles Lipson concludes that constitutional democracies have a "contracting advantage"--a unique ability to settle conflicts with each other by durable agreements. In so doing he forcefully counters realist claims that a regime's character is irrelevant...
This work collects decades of the best published scholarship in English on the unequivocally most successful political party in Japanese history: the Liberal Democratic Party (the LDP). Governing Japan for almost the entirety of the post-war period, the LDP also has a claim to be the most successful political party in any post-war democracy. Seminal articles in this collection explore the key aspects of the LDP: the party’s evolution since its founding in 1955; key facets of the LDP’s internal organization including factions and koenkai; the LDP in policy-making, including its relationship with the bureaucracy and interest groups, as well as its policy-making committee apparatus; and, party leadership, including the premierships of Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe.