Cornell Studies in Political Economy

A Region of Regimes traces the relationship between politics and economics—power and prosperity—in the Asia-Pacific in the decades since the Second World War. This book complicates familiar and incomplete narratives of the "Asian economic miracle" to show radically different paths leading to high growth for many but abject failure for some. T. J. Pempel analyzes policies and data from ten East Asian countries, categorizing them into three distinct regime types, each historically contingent and the product of specific configurations of domestic institutions, socio-economic resources, and external support.

Pempel identifies Japan, Korea, and Taiwan as developmental regimes, showing how each then diverged due to domestic and international forces. North Korea, Myanmar, and the Philippines (under Marcos) comprise "rapacious regimes" in this analysis, while Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand form "ersatz developmental regimes." Uniquely, China emerges as an evolving hybrid of all three regime types. A Region of Regimes concludes by showing how the shifting interactions of these regimes have profoundly shaped the Asia-Pacific region and the globe across the postwar era.

Silicon Valley has become shorthand for a globally acclaimed way to unleash the creative potential of venture capital, supporting innovation and creating jobs. In The Venture Capital State Robyn Klingler-Vidra traces how and why different states have adopted distinct versions of the Silicon Valley model.

Venture capital seeks high rewards but is enveloped in high risk. The author's deep investigations of venture capital policymaking in East Asian states (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) show that success does not reflect policymakers' ability to replicate the Silicon Valley model. Instead, she argues, performance reflects their skill in adapting a highly lauded model to their local context. Policymakers are "contextually rational" in their learning; their context-rooted norms shape their preferences. The normative context for learning about policy—how elites see themselves and what they deem as locally appropriate—informs how they design their efforts.

The Venture Capital State offers a novel conceptualization of rationality, bridging diametrically opposed versions of bounded and conventional rationality. This new understanding of rationality is simultaneously fully informed and context based, and it provides a framework by which analysts can bring domestic factors to the very heart of international diffusion of policy. Klingler-Vidra concludes that states have a visible hand in constituting even quintessentially neoliberal markets.

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

Sinclair offers a highly accessible account of bond rating agencies: their origins and the rating processes they use to judge creditworthiness. Illustrated with a wide range of cases, this book offers a fresh assessment of the role of an often-overlooked institution in the dynamics of modern global capitalism.

Dorothee Bohle and Bela Geskovits trace the fundamental decisions made by postsocialist countries that have joined the European Union since 2004 or are candidates to do so.

Darius Ornston explains how several of Europe's technological laggards, in particular Denmark, Finland, and Ireland, managed to assume leading positions in new, high-tech industries: biotechnology, software, telecommunications equipment.

International relations are generally understood as a realm of anarchy in which countries lack any superior authority and interact within a Hobbesian state of nature. In Hierarchy in International Relations, David A. Lake challenges this traditional...

An overarching ambiguity characterizes East Asia today. The region has at least a century-long history of internal divisiveness, war, and conflict, and it remains the site of several nettlesome territorial disputes. However, a mixture of complex and...

After the devastation of World War II, Germany and Japan built national capitalist institutions that were remarkably successful in terms of national reconstruction and international competitiveness. Yet both "miracles" have since faltered, allowing U.S. capital and its institutional forms to establish global dominance. National varieties of capitalism are now under intense pressure to converge to the U.S. model. Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck have gathered an international group of authors to examine the likelihood of convergence—to determine whether the global forces of Anglo-American capitalism will give rise to a single, homogeneous capitalist system.

The chapters in this volume approach this question from five directions: international integration, technological innovation, labor relations and production systems, financial regimes and corporate governance, and domestic politics. In their introduction, Yamamura and Streeck summarize the crises of performance and confidence that have beset German and Japanese capitalism and revived the question of competitive convergence. The editors ask whether the two countries, confronted with the political and economic exigencies of technological revolution and economic internationalization, must abandon their distinctive institutions and the competitive advantages these have yielded in the past, or whether they can adapt and retain such institutions, thereby preserving the social cohesion and economic competitiveness of their societies.

The United States has never felt at home abroad. The reason for this unease, even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is not frequent threats to American security. It is America's identity. The United States, its citizens believe, is a different country, a New World of divided institutions and individualistic markets surviving in an Old World of nationalistic governments and statist economies. In this Old World, the United States finds no comfort and alternately tries to withdraw from it and reform it. America cycles between ambitious internationalist efforts to impose democracy and world order, and more nationalist appeals to trim multilateral commitments and demand that the European and Japanese allies do more.In At Home Abroad, Henry R. Nau explains that America is still unique but no longer so very different. All the industrial great powers in western Europe (and, arguably, also Japan) are now strong liberal democracies. A powerful and peaceful new world exists beyond America's borders and anchors America's identity, easing its discomfort and ending the cycle of withdrawal and reform.Nau draws on constructivist and realist perspectives to show how relative national identities interact with relative national power to define U.S. national interests. He provides fresh insights for U.S. grand strategy toward various countries. In Europe, the identity and power perspective advocates U.S. support for both NATO expansion to consolidate democratic identities in eastern Europe and concurrent, but separate, great-power cooperation with Russia in the United Nations. In Asia, this perspective recommends a shift of U.S. strategy from bilateralism to concentric multilateralism, starting with an emerging democratic security community among the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Taiwan, and progressively widening this community to include reforming ASEAN states and, if it democratizes, China. In the developing world, Nau's approach calls for balancing U.S. moral (identity) and material (power) commitments, avoiding military intervention for purely moral reasons, as in Somalia, but undertaking such intervention when material threats are immediate, as in Afghanistan, or material and moral stakes coincide, as in Kosovo.

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 recent events, the authors examine the East Asian experience to show how the developmental state involves a combination of political, bureaucratic, and moneyed influences that shape economic life in the region. Taking as its point of departure Chalmers Johnson's account of the Japanese developmental state, the book explores the interplay of forces that have determined the structure of opportunity in the region. The authors critically address the argument for centralized political involvement in industrial development (with a new contribution by Johnson), describe the historical impact of colonialism and the Cold War, consider new ideas in economics, and compare the experiences of East Asian countries with those of France, Brazil, Mexico, and India.

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...

The Liberal Democratic Party, which dominated postwar Japan, lost power in the early 1990s. During that same period, Japan's once stellar economy suffered stagnation and collapse. Now a well-known commentator on contemporary Japan traces the political...

Conventional wisdom argues that the integration of the world economy is making national governments less powerful, but Linda Weiss disagrees. In an era when global society and the transnational market are trendy concepts, she suggests that state capacities for domestic transformative strategies provide a competitive advantage. Some of the most successful economies rely on state-informed and state-embedded institutions for governing the economy. In fact, she contends, the strength of external economic pressures is largely determined domestically, and the effect of such pressures varies with the strength of domestic institutions.

Weiss analyzes the sources and varieties of state capacity for governing industrial transformation in contemporary cases: the unraveling of Sweden's distributive model of adjustment, the evolution of developmental states in Northeast Asia, and the parallel strengths of the German and Japanese systems of industrial coordination. Her comparative perspective allows her to show how different types of state capacity affect industrial vitality and domestic adjustment to global forces. As economic integration proceeds, she concludes, state capabilities will matter more rather than less in fostering social well-being and the creation of wealth.

'Pontusson's book does an excellent job in taking a critical look at Swedish investment politics.... On the whole, this book is the best overall explanation of Swedish investment politics. It gives the reader a clear basis for understanding the rise of Swedish social democracy and provides a detailed examination of the developments of industrial policy, codetermination, and wage-earner funds.'—Contemporary Sociology

How will the crucial resource of technology shape the world order now emerging from the collapse of the USSR? How should international trade in advanced technology be regulated? In Economic Containment, Michael Mastanduno addresses the way such questions are confronted at both national and international levels. Mastanduno provides a definitive account of how the United States and its Western allies coordinated controls on exports of high technology, especially those with possible military applications, to the Soviet Union. Principally, Mastanduno examines the ways in which effective cooperation was forged in the Coordinating Committee (better known as CoCom), the primary Western export control organization between 1949 and 1990.

Ten original essays examine the political and institutional factors that influence the initiation and efficiency of preferential credit policies in Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, and Brazil.

John Goodman illuminates both the role of the central banks and the complex politics of monetary policy in Germany, France, and Italy.

The regulation of foreign banks in advanced industrial countries has changed radically since the late 1950s as national authorities have removed or loosened restrictions on overseas financial institutions doing business in local markets. Opening Financial Markets explores the reasons behind the retreat of protectionist policies in domestic banking systems and proposes a political explanation for this important development.

H. Richard Friman characterizes the new protectionism of the 1980s as a ragged patchwork of selectively applied, direct and indirect protectionist policies—including tariffs, quotas, administrative restrictions, state subsidies, and production cartels. Why have various advanced industrial countries responded to postwar trade competition with different choices among these protectionist options? In Patchwork Protectionism, Friman explores this question through a comparative analysis of major trade policy decisions affecting the textile industries of the United States, Japan, and West Germany.

The notion of regimes as institutions that shape international behavior has received much attention from scholars in the field of international relations as a way of understanding how sovereign states secure international cooperation. Oran Young here seeks both to develop our theoretical grasp of international regimes and to expand the range of empirical applications of this line of analysis.

Why have some countries succeeded in dislodging multinational corporations from domestic industries while others have not? In an innovative response to this central question in political economy, Dennis J. Encarnation examines the critical case of India over the past forty years. Arguing that India's extraordinary success in supplanting multinationals from one domestic industry after another contradicts the experiences of other newly industrializing countries, Encarnation brings meticulous data to bear on the ongoing theoretical debate about the usefulness of bargaining and dependency approaches to the question of national control within an international capitalist system.

The energy markets of modern Japan—a country peculiarly dependent on imported energy—present a paradox for conventional explanations of that country's economic success. State energy corporations are commonplace throughout the industrial democracies, yet nowhere does Japan's strong, "smart" state participate directly in the marketplace to assure the energy supplies on which its commercial competitiveness depends.

In The Business of the Japanese State, Richard J. Samuels addresses this paradox by tracing the details of government–industry transactions in the component parts of the market for energy. Drawing upon archival sources and more than one hundred interviews with industrialists and government planners, he reconstructs the political histories that have defined the contemporary Japanese markets for coal, petroleum, electricity, and alternative energies. The key to interventions and accommodations is, he argues, the notion of "reciprocal consent"—in a constantly changing political bargain, the state gets jurisdiction but private industry manages to retain control. The result is a profoundly consensual politics whose character reflects the essence of the contemporary Japanese political economy.

When the controversy over the Siberian natural gas pipeline erupted in 1982, it was not the first time that the issue of East-West energy trade had brought the United States into conflict with its Western European allies. It was, however, the first time that the United States lacked the leverage necessary to change its allies' policies. In addition American political opposition more closely resembled the politics of the 1980 grain embargo than the anti-energy trade consensus of earlier decades. How are these changes to be explained? What have their consequences been for American economic coercive power against the Soviet Union? Bruce Jentleson addresses these and other crucial questions in this comprehensive and incisive study.