East Asia

Abstract: Published originally in 1990 to critical acclaim, Robert Wade's Governing the Market quickly established itself as a standard in contemporary political economy. In it, Wade challenged claims both of those who saw the East Asian story as a vindication of free market principles and of those who attributed the success of Taiwan and other countries to government intervention. Instead, Wade turned attention to the way allocation decisions were divided between markets and public administration and the synergy between them. Now, in a new introduction to this paperback edition, Wade reviews the debate about industrial policy in East and Southeast Asia and chronicles the changing fortunes of these economies over the 1990s. He extends the original argument to explain the boom of the first half of the decade and the crash of the second, stressing the links between corporations, banks, governments, international capital markets, and the International Monetary Fund. From this, Wade goes on to outline a new agenda for national and international development policy.

Abstract: While much attention has been focused on Japan's meteoric rise as an economic power, South Korea has been quietly emerging as the next industrial giant to penetrate the world market. South Korea is one of a series of countries (ranging from Taiwan, India, Brazil, and Turkey, to Mexico, and including Japan) to have succeeded through borrowing foreign technology rather than by generating new products or processes. Describing such countries as `late-industrializers,' Amsden demonstrates why South Korea has become the most successful of this group. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0195076036/toc.html

Abstract: "The Great Divergence" brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

Abstract: PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Varieties of Capitalism PART II: THE COMPARATIVE BUSINESS SYSTEMS FRAMEWORK 2. The Nature of Business Systems and their Institutional Structuring 3. The Social Structuring of Firms' Governance Systems and Organizational Capabilities 4. The Social Structuring of Work Systems 5. Globalization and Business Systems PART III: THE DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE OF BUSINESS SYSTEMS IN EAST ASIA AND EASTERN EUROPE 6. Divergent Capitalisms in East Asia: The Development of the Post-War Business Systems of South Korea and Taiwan 7. Continuity and Change in East Asian Capitalisms 8. Path Dependence and Emergent Capitalisms in Eastern Europe: Hungary and Slovenia Compared 9. Enterprise Change and Continuity in a Transforming Society: The Case of Hungary