Japanese Resistance to American Financial Hegemony

Japanese Resistance to American Financial Hegemony
Author: Fumihito Gotoh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000672816

This book investigates why the convergence of Japan’s bank-centered financial system to an American-style capital market-based model has lost steam since the mid-2000s, despite financial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s. Examining the ideational conflict within Japanese elites between the market liberalization and anti-free market camps, it scrutinizes the American and Japanese credit rating agencies operating in Tokyo and explores the differences between the two major industrial associations, Keidanren and Doyukai, which have played a key role as "ideational platforms" for Japanese corporate society. The book emphasizes the concept of "systemic support", whose broadened definition incorporates dominant elites’ support and protection of subordinates in exchange for the latter’s obedience and loyalty. It argues that Japanese society’s anti-liberal, anti-free market norms centered on systemic support are a form of counter-hegemony, and this has resisted American financial hegemony, promoting international capital mobility and capital markets, and prevented capitalist dominance from severing long-term social ties such as management-labor cooperation and corporate group alliances. Yet this resistance has generated growing problems for Japan. With a focus on social norms, bureaucracy, credit rating agencies, industrial associations and corporate governance, this book will provide useful insights for scholars and students of international political economy, sociology, cultural studies, and business studies.

Moral Hazard

Moral Hazard
Author: Juan Flores Zendejas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000515028

Moral Hazard is a core concept in economics. In a nutshell, moral hazard reflects the reduced incentive to protect against risk where an entity is (or believes it will be) protected from its consequences, whether through an insurance arrangement or an implicit or explicit guarantee system. It is fundamentally driven by information asymmetry, arises in all sectors of the economy, including banking, medical insurance, financial insurance, and governmental support, undermines the stability of our economic systems and has burdened taxpayers in all developed countries, resulting in significant costs to the community. Despite the seriousness and pervasiveness of moral hazard, policymakers and scholars have failed to address this issue. This book fills this gap. It covers 200 years of moral hazard: from its origins in the 19th century to the bailouts announced in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak. The book is divided into three parts. Part I deals with the ethics and other fundamental issues connected to moral hazard. Part II provides historical and empirical evidence on moral hazard in international finance. It examines in turn the role of the export credit industry, the international lender of last resort, and the IMF. Finally, Part III examines specific sectors such as automobile, banking, and the US industry at large. This is the first book to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of moral hazard and explain why addressing this issue has become crucial today. As such, it will attract interest from scholars across different fields, including economists, political scientists and lawyers.

Adopting and Adapting Innovation in Japan's Digital Transformation

Adopting and Adapting Innovation in Japan's Digital Transformation
Author: Anshuman Khare
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2023-05-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9819903211

This book explores how the business transformation taking place in Japan is influenced by the digital revolution. The chapters present approaches and examples from sectors commonly understood to be visible arenas of digital transformation—3D printing and mobility, for instance—as well as some from not-so-obvious sectors, such as retail, services, and fintech. Business today is facing unprecedented change especially due to the adoption of new, digital technologies, with a noticeable transformation of manufacturing and services. The changes have been brought by advanced robotics, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and digital networks that are growing in size and capability as the number of connected devices explodes. In addition, there are advanced manufacturing and collaborative connected platforms, including machine-to-machine communications. Adoption of digital technology has caused process disruptions in both the manufacturing and services sectors and led to new business models and new products. While examining the preparedness of the Japanese economy to embrace these changes, the book explores the impact of digitally influenced changes on some selected sectors from a Japanese perspective. It paints a big picture in explaining how a previously manufacturing-centric, successful economy adopts change to retain and rebuild success in the global environment. Japan as a whole is embracing, yet also avoiding—innovating but also restricting—various forms of digitalization of life and work. The book, with its 12 chapters, is a collaborative effort of individuals contributing diverse points of view as technologists, academics, and managers.

Japan’s Secular Stagnation and Beyond

Japan’s Secular Stagnation and Beyond
Author: Radhika Desai
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2023-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000872300

This book re-visits the phenomenon of Japanese secular stagnation in light of the fate of the North Atlantic and developing economies and places it in a longer historical political and geopolitical economy of capitalism from a variety of political and disciplinary perspectives. Japanese capitalism, which was once an admired model of miraculous growth with a relatively egalitarian distribution of income, fell into secular stagnation in the early 1990s. The phenomenon has since fascinated observers, provoked debates, provided policy advocates with grist for the mills of a range of policy proposals, some of them mutually contradictory, and, most importantly, burdened an entire population, and particularly its young. Japan’s secular stagnation has raised new questions about policy difficulties on a range of fronts – dramatically lowered growth rate despite comparatively high investment, deteriorating labor conditions, rising class and gender inequality, a profound and many-faceted crisis of social reproduction and a deepening fiscal crisis of the state – all of which have important international ramifications. Moreover, interest in and the importance of Japan’s secular stagnation grew rapidly after 2008 as many have sought to understand the economic malaise of the North Atlantic by analogy and comparison with all or parts of the Japanese condition. The introduction and chapters in this book attempt to understand the causes, character and consequence of that original affliction. They also reflect on the meaning of Japan’s secular stagnation at this stage of development capitalism. The result contains the key to understanding the more widespread economic malaise of our time. This book will be a beneficial read for researchers and scholars of Economics and Politics interested in Japanese Studies as well as the Japanese political economy. Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Japanese Political Economy. The last chapter was originally published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.

The Future of Multilateralism and Globalization in the Age of the U.S.–China Rivalry

The Future of Multilateralism and Globalization in the Age of the U.S.–China Rivalry
Author: Norbert Gaillard
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-10-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000986969

Despite the growing consensus that the rise of China is transforming international relations, policy makers and scholars have not sufficiently addressed the geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of a new paradigm, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war. This book fills this gap. This is an original and innovative book that investigates how a new modus vivendi between China and the United States in a post-globalized world requires more economic independence because of the distrust between G20 economies but heightened international cooperation, in order to avert a shift to nationalism and protectionism and to fight financial and climate crises. The book is divided into four parts. Part I investigates the specific features of Chinese and U.S. capitalisms; Part II argues that several flaws observed in the multilateral architecture since the early 2000s have caused global imbalances and increased misunderstanding and mistrust between the two superpowers; Part III analyzes how the China-U.S. rivalry has manifested in Asia, Latin America, and in terms of global development finance and finally, Part IV provides a blueprint for a successful and revamped international order. The book provides an ambitious interdisciplinary analysis of the future of multilateralism and globalization with contributions from economists, lawyers, and political scientists. Due to its multidisciplinary approach, the book will attract the interest of scholars and postgraduate students from wide ranging fields, as well as practitioners working in international organizations, policy makers and more generally educated lay readers interested in the topic.

Building a New Economy

Building a New Economy
Author: D Hugh Whittaker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-08-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198893396

Building a New Economy uses an evolutionary conceptual framework of states-and-markets, organizations-and-technology, and institutional change. It shows how the institutional coherence of the manufacturing-centred postwar model broke down, and was followed by the ideological and institutional dissonance of the 'lost decades'.

Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets

Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets
Author: Ilias Alami
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000769003

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the messy and crisis-ridden relationship between the operations of capitalist finance, global capital flows, and state power in emerging markets. The politics, drivers of emergence, and diversity of these myriad forms of state power are explored in light of the positionality of emerging markets within the network of space and power relations that characterises contemporary global finance. The book develops a multi-disciplinary perspective and combines insights from Marxist political economy, post-Keynesian economics, economic geography, and postcolonial and feminist International Political Economy. Alami comprehensively reviews the theories, histories, and geographies of cross-border finance management, and develops a conceptual framework which allows unpacking the complex entanglement of constraint and opportunities, of growing integration and tight discipline, that cross-border finance represents for emerging markets. Extensive fieldwork research provides an in-depth comparative critical interrogation of the policies and regulations deployed in Brazil and South Africa. This volume will be especially useful to those researching and working in the areas of international political economy, contemporary geographies of money and finance, and critical development studies. It should also prove of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and activists concerned with the relation between finance and development in emerging markets and beyond.

The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion

The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion
Author: Serena Natile
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-01-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429603770

Focusing on Kenya’s path-breaking mobile money project M-Pesa, this book examines and critiques the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality, arguing for a politics of redistribution to guide future digital financial inclusion projects. One of the most-discussed digital financial inclusion projects, M-Pesa facilitates the transfer of money and access to formal financial services via the mobile phone infrastructure and has grown at a phenomenal rate since its launch in 2007 to reach about 80 per cent of the Kenyan population. Through a socio-legal enquiry drawing on feminist political economy, law and development scholarship and postcolonial feminist debate, this book unravels the narratives and institutional arrangements that frame M-Pesa’s success while interrogating the relationship between digital financial inclusion and gender equality in development discourse. Natile argues that M-Pesa is premised on and regulated according to a logic of opportunity rather than a politics of redistribution, favouring the expansion of the mobile money market in preference to contributing to substantive gender equality via a redistribution of the revenue and funding deriving from its development. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in Global Political Economy, Socio-Legal Studies, Gender Studies, Law & Development, Finance and International Relations.

Comparative Political Economy

Comparative Political Economy
Author: Ben Clift
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1352011263

This is a book about how 21st-century capitalism really works. Modern economics strips away social, historical, and political context from analysis of 'the economic', but the economy is far too important to leave exclusively to the economists. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) is a much broader, richer intellectual undertaking which 're-embeds' the analysis of the economic within the social and political realm. This is at the heart of how to think like a political economist. This text maps the terrain and evolution of CPE, providing the analytical tools to explore the many variants of capitalism, unearthing their roots in competing visions of the desirable distribution of the fruits of growth. Connecting CPE systematically to the subfield of International Political Economy (IPE), the book explains how these visions generate ongoing political struggles over how to regulate and manage capitalism. This is the perfect introduction to the field for all students of CPE and IPE. New to this Edition: - Fully revised and updated throughout to take into account the latest empirical and theoretical developments in this fast-moving field - A brand New chapter on the political economy of inequality, populism, Trump & Brexit - New expanded 'how to use this book' aimed at student readers - More coverage of the types of economies covered, to move from an exclusively Western focus to cover developing and emerging global economies

State-permeated Capitalism in Large Emerging Economies

State-permeated Capitalism in Large Emerging Economies
Author: Andreas Nölke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-08-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0429536739

This book systematically analyzes the economic dynamics of large emerging economies from an extended Comparative Capitalisms perspective. Coining the phrase ‘state-permeated capitalism’, the authors shift the focus of research from economic policy alone, towards the real world of corporate and state behaviour. On the basis of four empirical case studies (Brazil, India, China, South Africa), the main drivers for robust economic growth in these countries from the 2000s until the 2010s are revealed. These are found, in particular, in mutual institutional compatibilities of ‘state-permeated capitalism’, in their large domestic markets, and beneficial global economic constellations. Differences in their institutional arrangements are explored to explain why China and India have been more economically successful than Brazil and South Africa. The authors highlight substantial challenges for the stability of state-permeated capitalism and assess the potential future growth, sustainability and likely pitfalls for these large emerging economies. Opening further avenues for empirical and theoretical research, this book raises questions for the future of the global economic order and should appeal to academics, graduate students and advanced undergraduates in politics, economics, economic sociology and development studies. It should also prove a worthwhile and provocative read for development practitioners and policy-makers.