Two Crises, Different Outcomes

This volume examines East Asian policy reactions to the global financial crisis of 2008–9 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98.

T. J. Pempel is Jack M. Forcey Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coeditor of Crisis as Catalyst: Asia’s Dynamic Political Economy, also from Cornell, and Japan in Crisis: What Will It Take for Japan to Rise Again? Keiichi Tsunekawa is Professor in the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of The State and Private Business and the editor of Democratic Identity: Formation of Emerging Democracies, both in Japanese.

[The book's arguments are made] cogently and with strong empirical backing.... Moreover, the essays on the region's different economies provide important nuances to the book's central arguments.

Ramon Pacheco Pardo:

T. J. Pempel and Keiichi Tsunekawa have edited a volume that succeeds in providing a comprehensive overview of the extent to which domestic politics across several East Asian countries determined their responses—and fate—during each of the crises.... Considering that the region seems to have learnt from the 1997–8 experience, this should be of interest to scholars and policy-makers in the region and beyond.

Ambassador Barry Desker, Dean, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore:

Policymakers as well as scholars should read this book. It is a path-breaking and timely study of two recent East Asian financial crises that highlights 'the divergent political conditions that gave rise to particular crises as well as the political changes that individual crises may catalyze.' It does an excellent job of relating the domestic and global nexus and provides food for thought in a stimulating closing section by T. J. Pempel and Keiichi Tsunekawa that outlines alternative scenarios for the East Asian region.

Gregory W. Noble, University of Tokyo, author of Collective Action in East Asia: How Ruling Parties Shape Industrial Policy:

In Two Crises, Different Outcomes, T. J. Pempel and Keiichi Tsunekawa bring together a strong cast of acknowledged experts to investigate the ability of East and Southeast Asian countries to emerge relatively unscathed from the global financial upheaval following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.