Diversity and Transformations of Asian Capitalisms

Among a vast literature on the Asian economies, the book proposes a distinctive approach, inspired by Regulation Theory, in order to understand the current transformations of the Asian economies. The book follows their transformations after the 1997 Asian crisis until the subprime crisis. During this period, the viability of their growth regime was to coherence of five basic institutional forms: the degree of competition and insertion into the world economy, the nature of labour market organization, the monetary and exchange rate regimes and finally the style for State intervention via legislation, public spending and tax.

The book provides new findings. The degree of financial liberalization and opening to the world economy largely determines the severity of the 2008-2009 recession and the political-economic reactions of each Asian countries to the subprime crisis. Asian capitalisms are distinct from American and European ones, but they are quite diverse among themselves, and this differentiation has been widening during the last decade. This book will help to shed light on a de facto regional economic integration is taking place in Asia, but unsolved past political conflicts do hinder the institutionalisation of these interdependencies.

Robert Boyer, Senior Economist at CEPREMAP (Centre pour la Recherche Economique et ses Applications), is currently fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2010-2011). He is a contributor to Regulation Theory, i.e. a research program which analyzes how economic institutions evolve in the long run and defines diverse contemporary brands of capitalism. He has published extensively on labor institutions, technical change, institutional macroeconomics, economic history, financial crises and European integration. These publications include Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions (with R. Hollingsworth Eds), CUP, 1977; Japanese Capitalism in Crisis, with T. Yamada, Routledge, 2000; Regulation Theory the State of the Art, with Y. Saillard, Routledge, 2001; The Future of Economic Growth, Edward Elgar, 2004; History Repeating for Economists, An Anticipated Financial Crisis, Prisme n° 13, November 2008, Cournot Centre for Economic Research, Paris.

Hiroyasu Uemura is Professor of economics at Yokohama National University, Japan. He is a contributor to Regulation Theory, i.e. a research program which analyzes how economic institutions evolve in the long run and defines diverse contemporary brands of capitalism. He has published books and articles widely in the field of institutional economics and macroeconomic analysis. These include The Institutional Analysis of Socio-economic Systems: Beyond Marx and Keynes, Nagoya University Press, 2007 (with A. Isogai and A. Ebizuka). Furthermore, He also contributed to chapters in Boyer, R. and Yamada, T., Japanese Capitalism in Crisis: A Regulationist Interpretation, Routledge, 2000.

Akinori Isogai is Professor of economics at Kyushu University in Japan. He has published books and articles widely in the field of the evolutionary and institutional economics and institutional analysis on the contemporary Japanese economy. His recent publications include The Frontier of Institutional Economics: Theory, Application and Policy, Minerva Shobo, 2004, and The Institutional Analysis of Socio-economic Systems: Beyond Marx and Keynes, (with H. Uemura, and A. Ebizuka), Nagoya University Press, 2007.