How Bush bungled Asia: militarism,economic indifference and unilateralism have weakened the United States across Asia

Abstract

Criticism of the Bush administration's policies in East Asia is hardly common fare. Roseate colors certainly pervade the picture painted by defenders of Bush's policies toward Asia who argue that relations between the US and that region have never been better. This paper shows to the contrary that the Bush administration politicized wide swaths of public policy, including foreign relations, in an effort to create a permanent Republican electoral majority. That effort created a host of failures in America's Asian relations. The article focuses on three central problems: excessive militarization of American foreign policy; economic mismanagement; and a unilateralism that distanced the US from the rising Asian regionalism. The failures are not irreversible however and a change in administration has the potential to revitalize cross Pacific ties.     

The new Korean political economy: beyond the models of capitalism debate

Abstract

A key theme within the literature on the evolution of the Korean political economy since the 1997/8 crisis has been the extent to which Korea remains a ‘developmental state’ or has pursued radical neoliberal reform. These debates have not only reflected a concern with understanding the Korean economy but with a wider set of questions relating to the future of capitalist diversity within a globalized economy. By the late 1980s Korea had come to be regarded as a model of successful state-led late capitalist development. Korean modern economic history has insured that questions relating to the extent that it has pursued neoliberal reform have been of keen interest to students of political economy globally. This paper argues that substantive neoliberal reform has taken place in Korea since 1997. The thesis that a new ‘developmental state’ is in process of consolidating itself is simply wrong. However, the state's reform program interacted with material conditions and political coalitions at the meso level in a complex and uneven manner. In certain critical sectors, such as finance, a neoliberal regulatory regime has been consolidated. In others, such as telecommunications, developmentalist regulatory structures have proven to be highly resilient. In order to fully understand the complexity of the contemporary Korean political economy it is necessary, therefore, to prioritize the importance of meso-level analysis.     

State transformation and resource politics: Australia and the regional political economy

Abstract

Although the 1994 Agreed Framework offers a solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis, many problems may prevent its successful implementation. Should the Agreed Framework break down, the United States and South Korea have indicated that they will ask Japan to join them in a trilateral economic sanctions regime.

Japanese participation would include the severance of trade and financial flows, including money sent to North Korea from Japan's ethnic Korean community. In this paper I examine this financial flow, and, finding it a valuable linkage to the North Korean economy, conclude that Japanese participation is vital for a successful sanctions regime against North Korea.

Given this, I examine whether or not Tokyo's cooperation will be forthcoming. Japan would be inclined to participate given that it has a strong interest in eliminating a regional nuclear threat. Furthermore, Japan would also feel pressure from its allies to display diplomatic leadership in the Asia‐Pacific region, as befits a country of its economic importance.

Despite these international reasons for Japanese participation, domestic factors will be likely to prevent Tokyo from joining a sanctions regime: constitutional questions, the possibility of terrorist reprisals, interest in Pyongyang's regime maintenance, concerns for the rights of Japan's ethnic Korean community, and political ties between North Korean and Japanese politicians. I find that these domestic factors will outweigh international pressures for Japanese participation, and thus conclude that in the event of a breakdown in the Agreed Framework, alternatives to a trilateral sanctions strategy against North Korea must be considered.     

边缘与边缘化:城市化进程中失地农民的生活——基于浙江长兴县的实证调查

文章选取浙江长兴县两个具有代表性的拆迁自然村,进行调研与实证性分析,认为失地农民的社会角色从农民转换到城市居民,居住形态、就业方式、消费方式、社交方式、休闲方式等都发生了明显变化。失地农民存在被边缘与边缘化的现实困境,"新市民"的角色确定需要一个较长的过程。提出政府应为失地农民的可持续生计提供政策支持;加强对新市民迁居前后社会安全管理;构建和谐人居环境增强新市民社区归属感等建议。     

Posner,Bentham and the rule of economy

Law and economics is a prominent but understudied discourse of liberal government. This essay examines the work of Richard Posner, with special attention to his rediscovery of Jeremy Bentham as a founder of law and economics. Posner's new reading of Bentham accurately identifies Bentham as a fellow anti-juridical theorist of government and a fellow believer in the rule of economy. But Bentham's economy makes room for a range of disciplinary appropriations, and Posner's does not. Posner's economy is entirely defined and exhausted by a particular economic doctrine. The essay suggests that civil society has been over-emphasized in the literature contrasting classical and contemporary liberalism. Instead, it turns attention to a common understanding of law as a non-autonomous and flexible tactic of economic government and to the role of the various sciences that can inform it.     

Sub-prime mortgage lending: a cultural economy

Abstract

Developing cultural economists’ concerns with the assembly of agency in financial markets, agency in sub-prime mortgage lending in the United States is shown to have been made up through calculative devices of risk. Credit reporting and scoring provided for the targeting, sorting, pricing and governing of customers in terms of risk. The securitization of mortgages into risk-structured financial instruments made possible extended lending. Interest-only adjustable rate mortgage products called up mortgagors who, as leveraged investors, embraced risk in a rising property market. The current sub-prime mortgage crisis is understood in critical terms as a moment when the contradictions of these risk devices and their incapacity to capture the uncertain future have come to the surface, and agency in sub-prime lending has been disassembled. Cultural economy is thus shown to make a distinctive contribution to the politicization of sub-prime that stresses the ambiguous politics of calculation.     

‘A willing Odysseus’: The life and times of Albert O. Hirschman

Abstract

In this review essay of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O. Hirschman, A worldly philosopher, supplemented by references to other secondary works on Hirschman, I take the opportunity to discuss the relationship between the economist's life and his main publications. I argue that in times of crisis more attempts like Hirschman's political economy are needed. I further argue that Hirschman has given us a good idea of what a new moral economy, which really deserves this name, would look like.     

Visualizing the invisible hands: the shadow economy in North Korea

Abstract

The outside world is well aware of the totalitarian side of North Korea. Much less well-known is the shadow economy of the country which has enveloped the everyday lives of ordinary North Koreans for the last fifteen years or so. Based on refugee testimonies, this article aims to shed light on this heretofore unexamined aspect of the country, by visualizing the invisible hands of the ever-growing shadow economy in North Korea. In particular, we will investigate who the main actors are (the agency question), how they obtain their items (the supply mechanism), how they move items from one place to another (the distribution mechanism) and who consumes these items (the consumer question) in contemporary North Korean society.     

The price of everything and the value of nothing? Unravelling the workings of Russia's ‘virtual economy’

The unprecedented reliance on non-monetary exchange (NME) in transactions among industrial enterprises is one of the most remarkable features of Russia's post-Soviet economic transformation. This paper argues that firms engage in NME in order to discount nominal prices which remain well above market-clearing levels. The mechanisms which prevent a convergence between formal and actual transaction values include asset valuation rules, depreciation schedules, tax regulations and an inadequate bankruptcy mechanism. These distortions to the price-formation mechanism effectively operate to sustain a subsidy regime which has hitherto shielded much of Russian industry from the rigours of the market. The analysis concludes with an examination of the 1998 financial collapse, arguing that the crash was rooted in the breakdown of the subsidy system just described, a process which was strikingly similar to the breakdown of the Soviet economic system a decade earlier.