In Entrepreneurial States, an innovative examination of the comparative politics of reform in stakeholder systems, Yves Tiberghien analyzes the modern partnership between the state and global capital in attaining structural domestic change. The emergence of a powerful global equity market has altered incentives for the state and presented political leaders with a "golden bargain" the infusion of abundant and cheap capital into domestic stock markets in exchange for reform of corporate governance and other regulatory changes.

Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with policy and corporate elites in Europe and East Asia, Tiberghien asks why states such as Korea and France have embraced this opportunity and engaged in far-reaching reforms to make their companies more attractive to foreign capital, whereas Japan and Germany have moved forward much more grudgingly. Interest groups and electoral institutions have their impacts, but by tracing the unfolding dynamic of reform under different constraints, Tiberghien shows that the role of political entrepreneurs is critical. Such policy elites act as mediators between global forces and national constraints. As risk takers and bargain builders, Tiberghien finds, they use corporate reform to reshape their political parties and to stake out new policy ground. The degree of political autonomy available to them and the domestic organization of bureaucratic responsibility determine their ability to succeed."

The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production. Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains-such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads-generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

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.

How have state policies influenced the development of Japan's telecommunications, computer hardware, computer software, and semiconductor industries and their stagnation since the 1990s? Marie Anchordoguy's book examines how the performance of these industries and the economy as a whole are affected by the socially embedded nature of Japan's capitalist system, which she calls "communitarian capitalism."Reprogramming Japan shows how the institutions and policies that emerged during and after World War II to maintain communitarian norms, such as the lifetime employment system, seniority-based wages, enterprise unions, a centralized credit-based financial system, industrial groups, the main bank corporate governance system, and industrial policies, helped promote high tech industries. When conditions shifted in the 1980s and 1990s, these institutions and policies did not suit the new environment, in which technological change was rapid and unpredictable and foreign products could no longer be legally reverse-engineered.Despite economic stagnation, leaders were slow to change because of deep social commitments. Once the crisis became acute, the bureaucracy and corporate leaders started to contest and modify key institutions and practices. Rather than change at different times according to their specific economic interests, Japanese firms and the state have made similar slow, incremental changes.

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 of money flowed into oil-rich states, and efficient markets then placed that new money in cash-poor Third World economies. David Spiro has followed the money trail, and the story he tells contradicts the accepted beliefs. Most of the sudden flush of new oil wealth didn't go to poor oil-importing countries around the globe. Instead, the United States made a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell it U.S. securities in secret, a deal resulting in a substantial portion of Saudi assets being held by the U.S. government. With this arrangement, the U.S. government violated its agreements with allies in the developed world. Spiro argues that American policymakers took this action to prop up otherwise intolerable levels of U.S. public debt. In effect, recycled OPEC wealth subsidized the debt-happy policies of the U.S. government as well as the debt-happy consumption of its citizenry.

Domestic and international development strategies often focus on private ownership as a crucial anchor for long-term investment; the security of property rights provides a foundation for capitalist expansion. In recent years, Thailand's policies have been hailed as a prime example of how granting formal land rights to poor farmers in low-income countries can result in economic benefits. But the country provides a puzzle: Thailand faced major security threats from colonial powers in the nineteenth century and from communism in the twentieth century, yet only in the latter case did the government respond with pro-development tactics.

In Land and Loyalty, 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. Security concerns, he find, often guide economic policy. The domestic legacies, legal and socioeconomic, resulting from state responses to the outside world shape and limit the strategies available to politicians. While Larsson's extensive archival research findings are drawn from Thai sources, he situates the experiences of Thailand in comparative perspective by contrasting them with the trajectory of property rights in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines.

Banking on Growth Models contends that China's rapid economic rise from the late 1970s to today has been built on and shaped by a highly politicized and inefficient bank-centric financial system. Stephen Bell and Hui Feng argue that if the Chinese growth model drives how key economic sectors interact, no amount of incremental reform can have much impact on the financial system-meaningful reform can stem only from a revised growth model. For a time after the global financial crisis, it appeared that the expansion of a more market-oriented shadow banking system might help sustain China's economic growth. Since around 2015, however, Xi Jinping's regime has reversed this trajectory and placed China's financial system under heavy state control, resulting in slowed economic development and skyrocketing national debt. China's market transition and economic rebalancing are now in doubt, as is the fate of the nation's economy. By pinpointing finance as a vital element of the growth model, Bell and Feng provide a convincing assessment of financial risks and the prospects for economic rebalancing in China. Banking on Growth Models demystifies the world of Chinese banking and finance as it investigates an ever-rising national debt, a declining rate of economic growth, and the possibility of dire and drastic reform by the Asian superpower's government.

Collaborative Damage is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention-sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Based on their fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen provide new empirical insights into neocolonialism and Sinophobia in the Global South. The core argument in Collaborative Damage is that the different participants studied in the globalization processes-local workers and cadres; Chinese managers and entrepreneurs; and the authors themselves, three Danish anthropologists-are intimately linked in paradoxical partnerships of mutual incomprehension. The authors call this "collaborative damage," which crucially refers not only to the misunderstandings and conflicts they observed in the field, but also to their own failure to agree about how to interpret the data. Via in-depth case studies and tragicomical tales of friendship, antagonism, irresolvable differences, and carefully maintained indifferences across disparate Sino-local worlds in Africa and Asia, Collaborative Damage tells a wide-ranging story of Chinese globalization in the twenty-first century.

To the Brink of Destruction exposes how America's rating agencies helped generate the global financial crisis of 2007 and beyond, surviving and thriving in the aftermath. Despite widespread scrutiny, rating agencies continued to operate on the same business model and wield extraordinary power, exerting extensive influence over public policy. Timothy J. Sinclair brings the shadowy corners of this story to life by examining congressional testimony, showing how the wheels of accountability turned-and ultimately failed-during the crisis. He asks how and why the agencies risked their lucrative franchise by aligning so closely with a process of financial innovation that came undone during the crisis. What he finds is that key institutions, including the agencies, changed from being judges to being advocates years before the crisis, eliminating a vital safety valve meant to hinder financial excess. Sinclair's well-researched investigation offers a clear, accessible explanation of structured finance and how it works. To the Brink of Destruction avoids tired accusations, instead providing novel insight into the role rating agencies played in the worst crisis of modern global capitalism.

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."

Exploring Russia's reentry into global capital markets at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Global Finance, Local Control shows how economic integration became deeply entangled with a bare-knuckled struggle for control over the vestiges of the Soviet empire. Igor Logvinenko reveals how the post-communist Russian economy became a full-fledged participant in the international financial sector without significantly improving the local rule of law. By the end of Vladimir Putin's second presidential term, Russia was more integrated into the global financial system than at any point in the past. However, the country's longstanding deficiencies—including widespread corruption, administration of justice, and an increasingly overbearing state—continued unabated. Scrutinizing stock-market restrictions on foreign ownership during the first fifteen years of Russia's economic transition, Logvinenko concludes that financial internationalization allowed local elites to raise capital from foreign investors while maintaining control over local assets. They legitimized their wealth using Western institutions, but they did so on their terms. Global Finance, Local Control delivers a somber lesson about the integration of emerging markets: without strong domestic rule-of-law protections, financial internationalization entrenches oligarchic capitalism and strengthens authoritarian regimes.

From the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Man to the Principality of Liechtenstein and the state of Delaware, tax havens offer lower tax rates, less stringent regulations and enforcement, and promises of strict secrecy to individuals and corporations alike. In recent years government regulators, hoping to remedy economic crisis by diverting capital from hidden channels back into taxable view, have undertaken sustained and serious efforts to force tax havens into compliance.

In Tax Havens, Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux provide an up-to-date evaluation of the role and function of tax havens in the global financial system their history, inner workings, impact, extent, and enforcement. They make clear that while, individually, tax havens may appear insignificant, together they have a major impact on the global economy. Holding up to $13 trillion of personal wealth the equivalent of the annual U.S. Gross National Product and serving as the legal home of two million corporate entities and half of all international lending banks, tax havens also skew the distribution of globalization's costs and benefits to the detriment of developing economies.

The first comprehensive account of these entities, this book challenges much of the conventional wisdom about tax havens. The authors reveal that, rather than operating at the margins of the world economy, tax havens are integral to it. More than simple conduits for tax avoidance and evasion, tax havens actually belong to the broad world of finance, to the business of managing the monetary resources of individuals, organizations, and countries. They have become among the most powerful instruments of globalization, one of the principal causes of global financial instability, and one of the large political issues of our times."

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 why. Focusing on Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, she shows how the long-term development and internal attributes of central banks and state financial institutions shape their interactions with private bankers and influence their ability to manage the financial sector.The politics of finance in Southeast Asia is understudied, Hamilton-Hart contends, and central banks themselves virtually ignored. Yet central banks play a pivotal role in determining a country's vulnerability to regional and global financial pressures such as the currency and financial crises of the late 1990s. Southeast Asian central bankers were major players in the events surrounding these upheavals. Countries in the region experienced the economic chaos in different ways, however, as the central banks of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore drew upon different institutional capacities and legacies. Asian States, Asian Bankers brings new case material to the field of political economics and delineates the operation of central banks and their roles in the monetary and financial policies of three Southeast Asian states. In addition, Hamilton-Hart's work bridges two areas that have often been studied apart from each other: the national-level politics of financial management and the transnational orientation of many bankers in Southeast Asia.

In The Banker's Blacklist, Julia C. Morse demonstrates how the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has enlisted global banks in the effort to keep "bad money" out of the financial system, in the process drastically altering the domestic policy landscape and transforming banking worldwide. Trillions of dollars flow across borders through the banking system every day. While bank-to-bank transfers facilitate trade and investment, they also provide opportunities for criminals and terrorists to move money around the globe. To address this vulnerability, large economies work together through an international standard-setting body, the FATF, to shift laws and regulations on combating illicit financial flows. Morse examines how this international organization has achieved such impact, arguing that it relies on the power of unofficial market enforcement-a process whereby market actors punish countries that fail to meet international standards. The FATF produces a public noncomplier list, which banks around the world use to shift resources and services away from listed countries. As banks restrict cross-border lending, the domestic banking sector in listed countries advocates strongly for new laws and regulations, ultimately leading to deep and significant compliance improvements. The Bankers' Blacklist offers lessons about the peril and power of globalized finance, revealing new insights into how some of today's most pressing international cooperation challenges might be addressed.

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. Craig Parsons argues in A Certain Idea of Europe that this "something" was a particular set of ideas generated in Western Europe after the Second World War. In Parsons's view, today's European Union reflects the ideological (and perhaps visionary) project of an elite minority. His book traces the progressive victory of this project in France, where the battle over European institutions erupted most divisively. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with French policymakers, the author carefully traces a fifty-year conflict between radically different European plans. Only through aggressive leadership did the advocates of a supranational "community" Europe succeed at building the EU and binding their opponents within it. Parsons puts the causal impact of ideas, and their binding effects through institutions, at the center of his book. In so doing he presents a strong logic of "social construction" a sharp departure from other accounts of EU history that downplay the role of ideas and ideology."

The financial crisis that swept across East Asia during 1997 1998 was devastating not only in its economic impact but also in its social and political effects. The explosive growth and sociopolitical modernization that had powered the region for much of the preceding decade suddenly were dramatically interrupted. East Asia is economically outperforming the rest of the developing world once again and has become a leading force in the global economy. In the wake of the crisis, East Asia changed in important ways. Crisis as Catalyst contains assessments of these changes-both ephemeral and permanent- by a wide range of specialists in Asian economics and politics.The crisis, as the contributors to this volume show, catalyzed changes across political, corporate, and social arenas both in the countries hit hard by the crisis and in others throughout the region. The authors of Crisis as Catalyst examine what has changed (as well as what has not changed) in East Asia since the crisis, explain these variations, and reflect on the long-term significance of these developments."

As the Japanese economy languished in the 1990s Japanese government officials, business executives, and opinion leaders concluded that their economic model had gone terribly wrong. They questioned the very institutions that had been credited with Japan's past success: a powerful bureaucracy guiding the economy, close government-industry ties, "lifetime" employment, the main bank system, and dense interfirm networks. Many of these leaders turned to the U.S. model for lessons, urging the government to liberate the economy and companies to sever long-term ties with workers, banks, suppliers, and other firms.Despite popular perceptions to the contrary, Japanese government and industry have in fact enacted substantial reforms. Yet Japan never emulated the American model. As government officials and industry leaders scrutinized their options, they selected reforms to modify or reinforce preexisting institutions rather than to abandon them. In Japan Remodeled, Steven Vogel explains the nature and extent of these reforms and why they were enacted.Vogel demonstrates how government and industry have devised innovative solutions. The cumulative result of many small adjustments is, he argues, an emerging Japan that has a substantially redesigned economic model characterized by more selectivity in business partnerships, more differentiation across sectors and companies, and more openness to foreign players.

Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited brings together leading experts on the political economies of southern Europe-specifically Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal-to closely analyze and explain the primary socioeconomic and institutional features that define "Mediterranean capitalism" within the wider European context. These economies share a number of features, most notably their difficulties to provide viable answers to the challenge of globalization. By examining and comparing such components as welfare, education and innovation policies, cultural dimensions, and labor market regulation, Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited attends to both commonalities and divergences between the four countries, identifying the main reasons behind the poor performance of their economies and slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2008. This volume also sheds light on the process of diversification among the four countries and addresses whether it did and still does make sense to speak of a uniquely Mediterranean model of capitalism. Contributors: Alexandre Afonso, Leiden University; Lucio Baccaro, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; Rui Branco, NOVA University of Lisbon; Fabio Bulfone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; Giliberto Capano, University of Bologna; Sabrina Colombo, University of Milan; Lisa Dorigatti, University of Milan; Ana M. Guillen, University of Oviedo; Matteo Jessoula, University of Milan; Andrea Lippi, University of Florence; Manos Matsaganis, Polytechnic University of Milan; Oscar Molina, Autonomous University of Barcelona; Manuela Moschella, Scuola Normale Superiore; Sofia A. Perez, Boston University; Gemma Scalise, University of Bergamo; Arianna Tassinari, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

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 Woods era to the present day. McNamara argues that the development of a neoliberal economic policy consensus among European leaders in the years after the first oil crisis was crucial to stability in the European Monetary System and progress towards EMU. She identifies two factors, rising capital mobility and changing ideas about the government's proper role in monetary policymaking, as critical to the neoliberal consensus but warns that unresolved social tensions in this consensus may provoke a political backlash against EMU and its neoliberal reforms.McNamara's findings are relevant not only to European monetary integration, but to more general questions about the effects of international capital flows on states. Although this book delineates a range of constraints created by economic interdependence, McNamara rejects the notion that international market forces simply dictate government policy choice. She demonstrates that the process of neoliberal policy change is a historically dependent one, shaped by policymakers' shared beliefs and interpretations of their experiences in the global economy.

Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited brings together leading experts on the political economies of southern Europe-specifically Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal-to closely analyze and explain the primary socioeconomic and institutional features that define "Mediterranean capitalism" within the wider European context. These economies share a number of features, most notably their difficulties to provide viable answers to the challenge of globalization. By examining and comparing such components as welfare, education and innovation policies, cultural dimensions, and labor market regulation, Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited attends to both commonalities and divergences between the four countries, identifying the main reasons behind the poor performance of their economies and slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2008. This volume also sheds light on the process of diversification among the four countries and addresses whether it did and still does make sense to speak of a uniquely Mediterranean model of capitalism. Contributors: Alexandre Afonso, Leiden University; Lucio Baccaro, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; Rui Branco, NOVA University of Lisbon; Fabio Bulfone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; Giliberto Capano, University of Bologna; Sabrina Colombo, University of Milan; Lisa Dorigatti, University of Milan; Ana M. Guillen, University of Oviedo; Matteo Jessoula, University of Milan; Andrea Lippi, University of Florence; Manos Matsaganis, Polytechnic University of Milan; Oscar Molina, Autonomous University of Barcelona; Manuela Moschella, Scuola Normale Superiore; Sofia A. Perez, Boston University; Gemma Scalise, University of Bergamo; Arianna Tassinari, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

Pathways from the Periphery is an innovative interpretation of the development of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) which now dominate Third World industry and manufacturing trade. While such countries as Brazil and Mexico have achieved industrialization through strategies intended to foster self-reliance, the East Asian NICs-South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore-have grown rapidly through an aggressive policy promoting the export of manufactured goods. Stephan Haggard provides the first comprehensive comparison of the politics of industrialization in these East Asian and Latin American countries and offers new evidence on current issues in comparative political economy, including the implications of different growth paths for dependency, equity, and democracy. Recognizing the influence on development strategies of external shocks-such as depression, war, and reduced access to foreign capital-Haggard emphasizes the importance of domestic political institutions for economic decision-making. The East Asian NICs are characterized by close but regulated business-government alliances, weak labor movements, and politically insulated and administratively capable states: factors, Haggard shows, that have facilitated flexible and coherent industrial policies. He argues that "domestic" policy choices can shape the external constraints states face. The author considers in detail why Latin America's long-standing efforts to achieve self-reliance have ironically resulted in a dependence on international capital greater than that of the East Asian countries. Addressing a long-standing debate on the relationship between industrialization strategy and regime type, Haggard carefully assesses the connection between growth and democratic politics. Despite their authoritarian growth models the Asian NICs have, he observes, achieved greater equity than their Latin American counterparts. Although the "success" of export-led growth has in the past been associated with authoritarian rule, Haggard argues that no compelling theoretical reasons preclude democratic governments from achieving strong economic performance. Breaking new ground in theoretical inquiry and empirical research, Pathways from the Periphery will be welcomed by political economists, scholars and students of comparative politics, historians of Asian and Latin American public policy, and others concerned with the challenge of economic development.

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. As a result of the massive changes of the last twenty-five years, new explanations must be found for the economic success and industrial transformation in the region. State-assisted startups and incubator firms in East Asia have become major players in the manufacture of products with a global reach: Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision has assembled more than 500 million iPhones, for instance, and South Korea's Samsung provides the iPhone's semiconductor chips and retina displays.Drawing on extensive interviews with top executives and senior government officials, Yeung argues that since the late 1980s, many East Asian firms have outgrown their home states, and are no longer dependent on state support; as a result the developmental state has lost much of its capacity to steer and direct industrialization. We cannot read the performance of national firms as a direct outcome of state action. Yeung calls for a thorough renovation of the still-dominant view that states are the primary engine of industrial transformation. He stresses action by national firms and traces various global production networks to incorporate both firm-specific activities and the international political economy. He identifies two sets of dynamics in these national-global articulations known as strategic coupling: coevolution in the confluence of state, firm, and global production networks, and the various strategies pursued by East Asian firms to attain competitive positions in the global marketplace.

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. -- Cornell University Press

The Great Recession and its aftershocks, including the Eurozone banking and debt crisis, add up to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although economic explanations for the Great Recession have proliferated, the political causes and consequences of the crisis have received less systematic attention. Politics in the New Hard Times is the first book to focus on the Great Recession as a political crisis, one with both political sources and political consequences.

The authors examine variation in crises over time and across countries, rather than treating these events as undifferentiated shocks. Chapters also explore how crisis has forced the redefinition and reinforcement of interests at the level of individual attitudes and in national political coalitions. Throughout, the authors stress that the Great Recession is only the latest in a long history of international economic crises with significant political effects and that it is unlikely to be the last.

Contributors: Suzanne Berger, MIT; J. Lawrence Broz, University of California, San Diego; Peter Cowhey, University of California, San Diego; Peter A. Gourevitch, University of California, San Diego; Stephan Haggard, University of California, San Diego; Peter A. Hall, Harvard University; Miles Kahler, University of California, San Diego; Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University; Ikuo Kume, Waseda University; David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego; Megumi Naoi, University of California, San Diego; Stephen C. Nelson, Northwestern University; Pablo Pinto, Columbia University; James Shinn, Princeton University"