Cornell Studies in Political Economy

Set in the aftermath of China's entry into the World Trade Organization, Disaggregating China, Inc. questions the extent to which the liberal internationalist promise of membership has been fulfilled in China. Yeling Tan unpacks the policies that various Chinese government actors adopted in response to WTO rules and shows that rather than disciplining the state, WTO entry provoked a divergence of policy responses across different parts of the complex party-state.

Tan argues that these responses draw from three competing strategies of economic governance: market-substituting (directive), market-shaping (developmental), and market-enhancing (regulatory). She uses innovative web-scraping techniques to assemble an original dataset of over 43,000 Chinese industry regulations, identifying policies associated with each strategy. Combining textual analysis with industry data, in-depth case studies, and field interviews with industry representatives and government officials, Tan demonstrates that different Chinese state actors adopted different logics of adjustment to respond to the common shock of WTO accession. This policy divergence originated from a combination of international and domestic forces.

Disaggregating China, Inc. breaks open the black box of the Chinese state, explaining why WTO rules, usually thought to commit states to international norms, instead provoked responses that the architects of those rules neither expected nor wanted.

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.

If we believe that the small, open economies of Nordic Europe are paragons of good governance, why are they so prone to economic crisis? In Good Governance Gone Bad, Darius Ornston provides evidence that adapting flexibly to rapid, technological change and shifting patterns of economic competition may be a great virtue, but it does not prevent countries from making strikingly poor policy choices and suffering devastating results. Home to three of the "big five" financial crises in the twentieth century, Nordic Europe in the new millennium has witnessed a housing bubble in Denmark, the collapse of the Finnish ICT industry, and the Icelandic financial crisis.

Ornston argues that the reason for these two seemingly contradictory phenomena is one and the same. The dense, cohesive relationships that enable these countries to respond to crisis with radical reform render them vulnerable to policy overshooting and overinvestment. Good Governance Gone Bad tests this argument by examining the rise and decline of heavy industry in postwar Sweden, the emergence and disruption of the Finnish ICT industry, and Iceland's impressive but short-lived reign as a financial powerhouse as well as ten similar and contrasting cases across Europe and North America. Ornston demonstrates how small and large states alike can learn from the Nordic experience, providing a valuable corrective to uncritical praise for the "Nordic model."

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.

In Asian Designs, Saadia M. Pekkanen and her collaborators advance a new framework for debate and sophisticated examinations of institutional arrangements for several major issue areas in the world order—security, trade, environment, and public health.

In Too Few Women at the Top, Kumiko Nemoto draws on theoretical insights regarding Japan's coordinated capitalism and institutional stasis to challenge claims that the surge in women’s education and employment will logically lead to the decline of gender inequality and eventually improve women’s status in the Japanese workplace.

WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE
"BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS
WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY

"How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences."
― Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee

Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise.

How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth."

Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate.

Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"—top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials.

Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms.

Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

In Strategic Coupling, Henry Wai-chung Yeung examines economic development and state-firm relations in East Asia, focusing in particular on South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Katzenstein maintains that democratic corporatism is an effective way of coping with a rapidly changing world—a more effective way than the United States and several other large industrial countries have yet managed to discover.

Varietals of Capitalism shows that politics is an omnipresent part of the economics of wine and of economic activity in general. Based on a four-year research project encompassing fieldwork in France, Spain, Italy, and Romania, Xabier Itçaina, Antoine Roger, and Andy Smith examine the causes and effects of a 2008 reform adopted by the EU.

Katzenstein argues that regions have become critical to contemporary world politics, challenging those who emphasize the purportedly stubborn persistence of the nation-state or the inevitable march of globalization.

Kiren Aziz Chaudhry shows how state and market institutions are created and transformed in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two countries that typify labor and oil exporters in the developing worlds.

How have state policies influenced the development of Japan's telecommunications, computer hardware, computer software, and semiconductor industries and their stagnation since the 1990s?

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.

Cornelia Woll details the varying relationships between financial institutions and national governments by comparing national bank rescue schemes in the United States and Europe.

Linda Weiss attributes the U.S. capacity for transformative innovation to the strength of its national security state, a complex of agencies, programs, and hybrid arrangements that has developed around the institution of permanent defense preparedness and the pursuit of technological supremacy.

Although economic explanations for the Great Recession have proliferated, the political causes and consequences of the crisis have received less systematic attention. This is the first book to focus on it as a political rather than an economic crisis.

Poor Numbers is the first analysis of the production and use of African economic development statistics.

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.

Tomas Larsson argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Nicolas Jabko suggests, the character of European integration altered radically, from slow growth to what he terms a "quiet revolution." In this book he traces the political strategy that underlay the move from the Single...

Cioffi argues that highly politicized reform of corporate governance law has reshaped power relations within the public corporation in favor of financial interests, contributed to the profound crises of capitalism, and eroded its political foundations.

An innovative examination of the comparative politics of reform in stakeholder systems.

Investigating in depth how China implemented its economic policies between 1978 and 2010, Hsueh gives the most complete picture yet of China's regulatory state, particularly as it has shaped the telecommunications and textiles industries.

In The Money Laundry, J. C. Sharman investigates whether anti–money laundering policy works, and why it has spread so rapidly to so many states with so little in common.

The role of multilateral institutions in the shaping of global capitalism.

A distinguished group of experts, including historians, polling data analysts, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists, to explore global anti-Americanism in depth, using both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Small states have learned in recent decades that capital accumulates where taxes are low; as a result, tax havens have increasingly competed for the attention of international investors with tax and regulatory concessions. Economically powerful...

Focusing empirically on how political and economic forces are always mediated and interpreted by agents, both in individual countries and in the international sphere, Constructing the International Economy sets out what such constructions and what...

In Asia's Flying Geese, Walter F. Hatch tackles the puzzle of Japan's paradoxically slow change during the economic crisis it faced in the 1990s. Why didn't the purportedly unstoppable pressures of globalization force a rapid and radical shift in...

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...

In Networked Politics, a team of political scientists investigates networks in important sectors of international relations, including human rights, security agreements, terrorist and criminal groups, international inequality, and internet governance.

Whose Ideas Matter? is the first book to explore the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system from the perspective of local actors, with Asian regional institutions as its main focus.

Herrera explores the variance in implementation of international institutions through an examination of the international System of National Accounts (SNA), and, in particular, the success of post-Soviet Russia and other in implementing it.

Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms...

One World of Welfare offers a systematic, comparative examination of Japan's welfare policies and a critical assessment of previous research. Gregory J. Kasza rejects the view that the Japanese welfare system is unique; he challenges the nearly...

This book argues that East Asia's regional dynamics are no longer the result of a simple extension of any one national model.

"The unfettered marketplace, in which uncertainty rules and the admonition caveat emptor ('let the buyer beware') dictates each consumer decision, has today virtually disappeared. Consumers have become the focus of intensive economic policymaking...

The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans—and only Europeans—beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture...

A state's financial power is built on the effect its credit, property, and tax policies have on ordinary people: this is the key message of Leonard Seabrooke's comparative historical investigation, which turns the spotlight away from elite financial...

What are the relative merits of the American and European socioeconomic systems? Long-standing debates have heated up in recent years with the expansion of the European Union and increasingly sharp political and cultural differences between the United...

At the dawn of the twentieth century, imperial powers controlled most of the globe. Within a few decades after World War II, many of the great empires had dissolved, and more recently, multinational polities have similarly disbanded. This process of...

Drawing on field research in Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus, Rawi Abdelal provides an in-depth look at the link between national identity and the economic policies of the new states formed by the breakup of the Soviet Union.

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...

This book demonstrates the enduring, and even heightened, economic significance of national identities and nationalism in the current age.

Wherever there is money, there is money politics-a subject demanding ever greater attention at a time when monetary policies lead and the real economy follows. A principal defining characteristic of the contemporary global economy, Jonathan Kirshner...

The Japanese government seeks to influence the use of leisure time to a degree that Americans or Europeans would likely find puzzling. Through tourism-promotion initiatives, financing for resort development, and systematic research on recreational...

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.

Financial markets are given to instability, but some financial systems are more crisis-prone than others. Natasha Hamilton-Hart's historically grounded investigation of central banks, governments, and private bankers in Southeast Asia helps explain...

China began opening to the outside world in 1978. This process was designed to remain under the state's control. But the relative value of goods and services inside and outside China drove cities, enterprises, local governments, and individuals with...

Conventional wisdom holds that "institutions matter." Here, Andrew MacIntyre reveals exactly how they matter in the developing world. Combining an eye for current concerns in international politics with a deep knowledge of Southeast Asia, MacIntyre...

The effective governance of global money and finance is under enormous stress. Deep changes over the last decade in capital markets, exchange rate systems, and government finances suggest dramatic shifts in the contours of monetary power, with...

In Creating Cooperation, Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills...

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.

Does the European Union change the domestic politics and institutions of its member states? Many studies of EU decisionmaking in Brussels pay little attention to the potential domestic impact of European integration. Transforming Europe traces the...

Far from being an inevitably aggressive and destructive force, nationalism is, for Ernst B. Haas, the primary means of bringing coherence to modernizing societies.

The idea of European unity, which the Nordic states have historically resisted, has recently become the foremost concern of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland. Christine Ingebritsen provides a timely analysis of Nordic economic and security...

It is often said economics has become as important as security in international relations, yet we work with much less than full understanding of what goes on when government negotiators bargain over trade, finance, and the rules of international...

Between 1973 and 1980, the cost of crude oil rose suddenly and dramatically, precipitating convulsions in international politics. Conventional wisdom holds that international capital markets adjusted automatically and remarkably well: enormous amounts...

As one Asian economic crisis follows another, sending shock waves through the global market, questions about the making and conduct of industrial policy in the East take on a special urgency. Observers are sharply divided as to whether the ubiquitous...

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.

Applying a social-constructivist approach to her richly detailed case history, Audie Jeanne Klotz demonstrates that normative standards such as racial equality can serve as much more than a weak constraint on fundamental strategic concerns.

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...

Why have the states of Europe agreed to create an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and a single European currency? What will decide the fate of this bold project? This book explains why monetary integration has deepened in Europe from the Bretton...

Nonviolent state behavior in Japan, this book argues, results from the distinctive breadth with which the Japanese define security policy, making it inseparable from the quest for social stability through economic growth. While much of the literature...

In recent years governments have increasingly given their central banks the freedom to pursue policies of price stability. In particular, the German Bundesbank and the U.S. Federal Reserve have been widely considered models of autonomous policymaking. This book traces the origins of their success to the political struggle to adopt monetarism in Germany and the United States.

The Government of Money contends that the political involvement of monetarist economists was central to this endeavor. The book examines the initiatives undertaken by monetarists from 1970 to 1985 and the policies that resulted once their ideas were enacted. Taking a historical approach to major issues of political economy, Peter A. Johnson describes both the political efforts of the monetarist economists to convert central banks to their preferred policies and the resistance offered by traditionalist central bankers, politicians, and financial and labor interests.

Johnson concludes that monetarist ideas succeeded in part because their supporters convincingly claimed that price stability would promote political stability. He thereby challenges important assumptions about politics and policymaking in both countries and reveals the often hidden influence of monetary policy on the health of capitalist democracies.

West Germany from 1949 to 1990 was a story of virtually unparalleled political and economic success. This economic miracle incorporated a well-functioning political democracy, expanded to include a "social partnership" system of economic...

Over the past fifteen years, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan have transformed the relationship between governments and corporations. The changes are complex and the terms used to describe them often obscure the reality. In Freer Markets...

A former banker and staff member of the International Monetary Fund, Louis W. Pauly explains why people are deeply concerned about the emergence of a global economy and the increasingly integrated capital markets at its heart. In nations as diverse as...

Japanese scholars have begun to challenge conventional wisdom about effective labor organizing, and Ikuo Kume has written the first book in English to advance their controversial theory. Since at least the early 1980s, the power of organized labor has...

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.

Much of the debate about development in the past decade pitted proponents of unfettered markets against advocates of developmental states. Yet, in many developing countries what best explains variations in economic performance is not markets or states...

Despite increasingly open markets and a pervasive move toward international production methods, national governments continue to pursue remarkably distinctive policies for promoting innovation in industry. J. Nicholas Ziegler analyzes this apparent paradox by comparing government efforts to promote technological advance in Germany and France.

His findings reveal a great deal about the roots and limits of public strategies for economic growth. Through close comparison of three technologies— digital telephone exchanges, computer-controlled machine tools, and semiconductors—Ziegler shows how each country displays predictable strengths and weaknesses in promoting innovation. These distinctive capacities depend more upon the links among different skill- and knowledge-bearing elites than on the structure of the state or the industrial sector in question. As business outcomes hinge less on economies of scale and more on knowledge-based competition, the politics of contending interest groups steadily gives way to a competition for status and jurisdiction among more specialized professional groups. As a result, Germany's strengths stem directly from what Ziegler calls an ethos of competence whereas France's strengths stem from an order of state-created elites. More generally, Ziegler contends, neo-institutional approaches to public policy need to pay far more attention to the professional identities of different occupational groups.

Far from being an inevitably aggressive and destructive force, nationalism is, for Ernst B. Haas, the primary means of bringing coherence to modernizing societies. In the second volume of his magisterial exploration of this topic, Haas emphasizes the...

Rejecting conventional explanations for Syrian foreign policy, which emphasize the personalities and attitudes of leaders, cultural factors peculiar to Arab societies, or the machinations of the great powers, Fred H. Lawson describes key shifts in...

Robert M. Uriu analyzes the industrial policy-making process in Japan for industries faced with sudden economic decline. He takes exception to the traditional view that...

Since World War II, Japan has become not only a model producer of high-tech consumer goods, but also-despite minimal spending on defense-a leader in innovative technology with both military and civilian uses.

How does globalization change national economies and politics? Are rising levels of trade, capital flows, new communication technologies, and deregulation forcing all societies to converge toward the same structures of production and distribution...

How do states know what they want? Asking how interests are defined and how changes in them are accommodated, Martha Finnemore shows the fruitfulness of a constructivist approach to international politics. She draws on insights from sociological...

Michael C. Webb explores a central question about postwar economic history: how has the growth of international markets affected the coordination of economic policy among nations?

How can the global environment be safeguarded in the absence of a world government? In the vanguard of efforts to address this critical question, Oran R. Young draws on environmental issues to explore the nature of international governance. Young's...

'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

To citizens and political analysts alike, United States trade law is an incoherent conglomeration of policies, both liberal and protectionist. Seeking to understand the contradictions in American policy, Judith Goldstein offers the first book to demonstrate the impact of the political past on today's trade decisions. As she traces the history of trade agreements from the antebellum era through the 1980s, she addresses a fundamental question: What effects do shared ideas about economics—as opposed to national power or individual self-interest—have on the institutions that make and enforce trade law?

Goldstein argues that successful ideas become embedded in institutions and typically outlive the time during which they served social interests. She sets the stage with a discussion of the shifting commercial policy of the first half of the nineteenth century. After examining the consequences of the Republican party's decision to promote high tariffs between 1870 and 1930, she then considers in detail the political aftermath of the Great Depression, when the Democratic party settled on a reciprocal trade platform. Because the Democrats did not completely dismantle the existing system, however, the combined legacies of protection and openness help explain the intricacies in the forms of protectionism that political leaders have advocated since World War II.

Readers in such fields as political science, political economy, policy studies and law, international relations, and American history will welcome Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policy.

In the early twentieth century, the pattern of industrial energy consumption began its massive shift from reliance on coal to dependence on oil. This seismic event changed the world's strategic geography, overturned established relations between business and state, and resulted in global dominance for a select group of powerful oil multinationals. Providing a definitive history of these events, Gregory P. Nowell calls into question some common assumptions about the relations between international corporate struggles and national policymaking in such "mercantile" states as France.

Nowell reveals how the men who organized the world oil cartel of 1928 maintained a coherent strategy of transnational regulation as they controlled new hydrocarbon technologies through elaborate patent agreements. The cartel's strategy, Nowell argues, became the common fabric from which individual states cut their national oil policies, among them such apparently diverse measures as the French oil import law of 1928, the Red Line agreement controlling Iraqi oil exports, and the Texas Railroad Commission. Focusing on France, the author examines policy decisions aimed at safeguarding longterm supplies of petroleum, including adjudication of conflicts between Standard Oil and rival European companies. Drawing on extensive primary sources in France and the United States, Nowell details the processes through which the cartel's transnational structuring shaped the energy goals of France and of other nations, guided these nations' institutional development, and helped determine the international distribution of market power and technology. His analysis of the broad sweep of world oil politics leads to a penetrating critique of major theories of international relations.

In this tough-minded, lucid book, Debora L. Spar finds answers to these questions when she examines four commodity cartels. Along the way, she tells some intriguing stories of skulduggery and collusion.

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.

The Paradox of Continental Production will be stimulating reading for policymakers, political economists, and other observers of Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. politics.

Surveying the development of the steel, automobile, and semiconductor industries in each of these countries, Jeffrey A. Hart illuminates the role of national policy in a changing world.

Lowell Turner has extensively researched the German transformation in the 1990s. Indeed, in 1993 he was at the factory gates at Siemens in Rostock for the first major strike in post-Cold War eastern Germany.

As part of the postwar settlement, and especially since the 1960s, small European democracies instituted many entitlement programs and redistributive income policies. Each country has responded differently, however, to the economic stagnation that followed the turmoil in world trade and monetary relations of the 1970s. Comparing the recent history of relations among business, labor, and government in four countries, Paulette Kurzer addresses complex questions at the heart of contemporary debates in political economy: Why did the labor–business partnership collapse a decade earlier in Belgium and the Netherlands than in Austria and Sweden? Are Swedish and Austrian social democratic arrangements threatened as well?

Kurzer challenges the assumption that the evolution of social arrangements between government, labor, and employers can be understood without examining the interests of capital and trends toward transnationalization. The politics of distribution changed radically in the 1980s, she shows, when new international financial opportunities resulted in both a decline in productive domestic investment and a de-coupling of growth from investment. Though at different rates, increased global interdependence enhanced the power of business and finance in each country while undermining the government's ability to carve out national economic strategies and sustain social accords.

Business and Banking will be welcomed by political scientists, comparativists, political economists, economic historians, and others interested in finance and public policy.

Do people's beliefs help to explain foreign policy decisions, or is political activity better understood as the self-interested behavior of key actors?

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

How does the decline of the hegemon—the dominant, rule-making power of the international system—affect middle-level nations? By examining monetary and credit policy in postwar France, Michael Loriaux illuminates this question, tracing the relationship of domestic economic reform to specific changes in the international political economy which have resulted from U.S. hegemonic decline.

Union of Parts examines one of the central puzzles in the economic and political successes of West Germany (FRG). In the decades between world war and reunification with the East, the FRG provided a model for combining high rates of unionization and...

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.

Why do nations so frequently abandon unrestricted international commerce in favor of trade protectionism? David A. Lake contends that the dominant explanation, interest group theory, does not adequately explain American trade strategy or address the contradictory elements of cooperation and conflict that shape the international economy. Power, Protection, and Free Trade offers an alternative, systemic approach to trade strategy that builds on the interaction between domestic and international factors. In this innovative book, Lake maintains that both protection and free trade are legitimate and effective instruments of national policy, the considered responses of nations to varying international structures.

The West German "economic miracle," Simon Reich suggests, may be best understood as a result of the discriminatory economic policies of the Nazi regime. Reich contends that ideological and institutional characteristics originating under...

In Cooperation among Nations, Joseph M. Grieco offers a provocative answer to a fundamental question in world politics: How does the anarchical nature of the international system inhibit the willingness of states to work together even when they share common interests?

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.

Under the editorship of Peter J. Katzenstein, thirteen distinguished scholars from both sides of the Atlantic here provide an original interpretation of the political economy of the Bonn Republic during the forty years since its founding, and explore in particular its extraordinary capacity for accommodating change.

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.

Conflict between labor and capital reflects the competitive and conflict-laden relations within the working class itself, Peter Swenson maintains. Fair Shares examines the internal conflicts of organized labor regarding distribution of wages in order to explain both union leaders' market-structuring objectives in the "political economy", and their imperative to shape and fulfill workers' notions of pay fairness in the "moral economy". Swenson develops an innovative theoretical approach to labor politics through a detailed comparative analysis of union centralization and collective bargaining in Sweden and Germany since the turn of the century.

To create solidarity and overcome workers' opposition to centralized control of the labor movement, Swenson argues, union leaders depend heavily on moral appeals concerning fair pair distribution and on success in fulfilling workers' expectation of fairness. Swenson interprets union politics as the attempt to overcome what he calls the "wage policy trilemma"

Events of the 1970s and 1980s have provoked intense controversy about the desirability of existing political and economic institutions. On the basis of an analysis of social welfare in varying types of market systems and in certain democratic political systems, Democracy and Markets illuminates alternative directions for institutional reform.

The indebted-development strategies of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) have over the last two decades attracted much concern, both practical and scholarly. Herman M. Schwartz here examines a largely ignored historical parallel to the experience of the modern NICs—the formal and informal British dominions of the late nineteenth century, some of which achieved outstanding growth rates by borrowing abroad to finance agricultural development at home. Arguing that continued dependency is compatible with both development and economic growth, Schwartz offers an innovative reinterpretation of dependency theory in light of the economic development of Australia, Argentina, and New Zealand, and of the development strategies of today's South Korea.

In this lucid and theoretically sophisticated book, G. John Ikenberry focuses on the oil price shocks of 1973–74 and 1979, which placed extraordinary new burdens on governments worldwide and particularly on that of the United States. Reasons of State examines the response of the United States to these and other challenges and identifies both the capacities of the American state to deal with rapid international political and economic change and the limitations that constrain national policy.

In Collapse of an Industry, Campbell confronts controversial issues whose implications range far beyond the specifics of the nuclear power industry: the relative merits of free and controlled markets, the reliability of industrial planning, and the appropriate role of the state in managing economic activity.

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.

Capitalist governments around the world, however strongly they profess free market principles, have become deeply involved in the international market for petroleum. What success have they had as oil entrepreneurs, and what do their achievements and failures tell us about the nature of the state? In The Sovereign Entrepreneur, Merrie Gilbert Klapp develops a compelling comparative logic of state oil entrepreneurship. Drawing upon dozens of interviews with policymakers and company executives in Norway, Britain, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Klapp addresses a little understood determinant of policy—the pivotal bargaining power that domestic and international interests wield in different countries. Advanced capitalist countries, she finds, have generally not achieved their goals in the oil sector; they have been constrained by powerful, well-organized domestic interests. Less developed countries, by contrast, have faced little opposition at home, but the international banks and the multinationals have severely limited their attempts to expand into the global petroleum market. klapp argues that bureaucratic and domestic politics, not just economics, underlie the varying success of different countries in the marketplace.

Small nations, including Austria and Switzerland, have had to deal with conditions of economic openness and vulnerability throughout modern history. In Corporatism and Change Peter J. Katzenstein details the political-economic strategy that has allowed these two small states to maintain stable institutions in the face of changing international trends in the postwar era.

Since the early 1970s, states have been acquiring significant corporate holdings in commercial, competitive sectors in the mixed economies of the industrialized West. Why should governments move beyond regulation to become direct investors and producers? Jeanne Kirk Laux and Maureen Appel Molot explore this question in a sophisticated comparative examination of Canada's experience with public enterprises. They argue that changing conditions for economic growth, in particular the internationalization of production, best explain the expanded role that the state is playing in business.

February 1986 saw the downfall of President Ferdinand Marcos, and the Philippine people took to the streets to celebrate his departure. In The Philippine State and the Marcos Regime, Gary Hawes shows how a strong ruler who had dominated the political scene for twenty years lost his grip on power.

In this collection of essays, nine development specialists explore the Asian NICs' exceptional ability to capitalize on the favorable economic environment of the 1960s and then to adapt flexibly to worsening conditions in the 1970s and 1980s.

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.

This book addresses the crucial question of America's adjustment to changes in the international economy. It examines policies that will deal effectively with the continuing erosion of the U.S. share of exports and production in world markets and explores in particular the debate on "industrial policy."

Zysman demonstrates that there is a direct relationship between a nation's financial system and its government's ability to restart the growth engine.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer convert dollars into gold or other primary reserve assets, effectively ending the Bretton Woods regime that had governed post-World War II international monetary relations.

Complementing earlier works that emphasize international political and economic factors, Joanne Gowa's book examines the ways in which domestic influences contributed to this crucial action. In Closing the Gold Window, she argues that the mid-1971 decision was the consequence, in part, of the high priority Nixon administration officials assigned to maintaining U.S. freedom of action at home and abroad. She also maintains that the organization of the U.S. government for the conduct of international monetary policy played a role in the decision that ended the Bretton Woods regime.