Corporatism and Korean Capitalism employs corporatist theory to examine the Korean experience of state-business ties. It includes theoretical chapters on Asian and Korean corporatism, case studies of agriculture, industry and industrial relations and an introduction to comparative corporatism. It helps to push the study of Korean political and economic change from description on to theoretical analysis. This volume will challenge researchers and students of Asian studies, economics and politics to extend and refine their understanding of both corporatism and Korea. Moreover, this book offers a guide to policymakers confounded by the curious mix of collusion and competition in Korean political economy.
Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.
The Handbook explores institutional variations across the political economies of different societies within Asia. It includes empirical analysis of 13 major Asian business systems between India and Japan, and examines these in a comparative, historical, and theoretical context.
Rather than viewing the history of American capitalism as the unassailable ascent of large-scale corporations and free competition, American Fair Trade argues that trade associations of independent proprietors lobbied and litigated to reshape competition policy to their benefit. At the turn of the twentieth century, this widespread fair trade movement borrowed from progressive law and economics, demonstrating a persistent concern with market fairness - not only fair prices for consumers but also fair competition among businesses. Proponents of fair trade collaborated with regulators to create codes of fair competition and influenced the administrative state's public-private approach to market regulation. New Deal partnerships in planning borrowed from those efforts to manage competitive markets, yet ultimately discredited the fair trade model by mandating economy-wide trade rules that sharply reduced competition. Laura Phillips Sawyer analyzes how these efforts to reconcile the American tradition of a well-regulated society with the legacy of Gilded Age of laissez-faire capitalism produced the modern American regulatory state.
The first comprehensive review of the past and present of a leading sector, the volume offers a new interpretation of society and market in South Korea.
This important new work is the first comprehensive reference to the rapidly developing field of international political economy [IPE]. Featuring over 1200 A-Z entries, the coverage encompasses the full range of issues, concepts, and institutions associated with IPE in its various forms. Comprehensively cross-referenced and indexed, each entry provides suggestions for further reading along with guides to more specialized sources. Selected entries include: * African Development Bank * benign neglect * Black Monday * casino capitalism * debt management * efficiency * floating exchange rates * General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT] *information society/economy * Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries [OPEC] * Microsoft * multinational corporations, definitions * NATO * patents * rent-seeking * Schellin, Thomas *tax havens * trusts * Value-Added Tax [VAT] * zero-sum games * and many more.
This book studies the sources of inequality in contemporary South Korea and the social and political contention this engenders. Korean society is becoming more polarized. Demands for ‘economic democratization’ and a fairer redistribution of wealth occupy centre-stage of political campaigns, debates and discourse. The contributions offer perspectives on this wide-ranging socio-political change by examining the transformation of organized labour, civil society, the emergence of new cleavages in society, and the growing ethnic diversity of Korea’s population. Bringing together a team of scholars on Korea’s transition and democratization, the story the books tells is one of a society acutely divided by the neo-liberal policies that accompanied and followed the Asian financial crisis. Taken together, the contributions argue that tackling inequalities are challenges that Korean policy-makers can no longer postpone. The solution, however, cannot be imposed, once again, from the top down, but needs to arise from a broader conversation including all segments of Korean society. The book is intended for a readership interested in South Korean politics specifically, and global experiences in transition more generally.
Focusing on the sinking of the Sewol, a commercial ferry which capsized off the South Korean coast in April 2014, this book considers key issues of disaster, governance, civil society and the ideational transformation of human agents and their empowerment. Providing a lens through which to re-examine South Korean institutions, laws and practices, the volume examines the impact of the Sewol incident and what it reveals about the fault lines of South Korean society and governance. It addresses the repercussions of South Korea’s turn to a liberal democracy and neoliberal economy and reflects on the multilayered implications of the disaster in respect to the potential human costs of the country’s state-driven development policy and high stress modernisation. The book also highlights the relevance of the Korean experience for other societies on a similar developmental trajectories and facing similar challenges.
There are two great mysteries in the political economy of South Korea. How could a destroyed country in next to no time become a sophisticated and affluent economy? And how could a ruthlessly authoritarian regime metamorphose with relative ease into a stable democratic polity? South Korea was long ruled with harsh authoritarianism, but, strangely, the authoritarian rulers made energetic use of social policy. The Korean State and Social Policy observes South Korean public policy from 1945 to 2000 through the prism of social policy to examine how the rulers operated and worked. After the military coup in 1961, the new leaders used social policy to buy themselves legitimacy. That enabled them to rule in two very different ways simultaneously. In their determination to hold on to power they were without mercy, but in the use of power in governance, their strategy was to co-opt and mobilize with a sophistication that is wholly exceptional among authoritarian rulers. It is governance and not power that explains the Korean miracle. Mobilization is a strategy with consequences. South Korea was not only led to economic development but also, inadvertently perhaps, built up as a society rich in public and civil institutions. When authoritarianism collapsed under the force of nationwide uprisings in 1987, the institutions of a reasonably pluralistic social and political order were there, alive and well, and democracy could take over without further serious drama. This book is about many things: development and modernization, dictatorship and democracy, state capacity and governance, social protection and welfare states, and Korean history. But finally it is about lifting social policy analysis out of the ghetto of self-sufficiency it is often confined to and into the center ground of hard political science.
Not to repeat past mistakes: the sudden resurgence of a sympathetic interest in social democracy is a response to the urgent need to draw lessons from the history of the socialist movement. After several decades of analyses worthy of an ostrich, some rudimentary facts are being finally admitted. Social democracy has been the prevalent manner of organization of workers under democratic capitalism. Reformist parties have enjoyed the support of workers.
