The Enduring Legacies of the Global Financial Crisis in East Asia challenges the assumption that the global financial crisis had a limited structural impact on East Asian political economies, arguing that the crisis has led to a significant, if uneven, reorganization of major national political economies within the region where, in response to the crisis, states have promoted domestic processes of financialization as a means of stimulating their economies. The major East Asian economies, bar Japan, enjoyed strong recoveries from the 2008–2009 financial crisis. However, this success has been achieved by promoting domestic processes of financialization to maintain demand – more precisely, the rapid build-up of household debt (Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan, China) and asset price bubbles (China, Japan). In short, East Asia has employed precisely those practices that the global financial crisis itself illustrated the unsustainability of, to maintain growth. Using a post-Keynesian framework, the book argues that the dependency on these forms of financialization to support demand is a direct product of a failure to address the issue of inequality. High levels of inequality slow the growth of non-debt-based domestic consumption. An alternative approach to supporting demand in the post-crisis period would need to focus on progressive redistribution through strengthening of labour rights and systems of social support, which would directly challenge the interests of economic and political elites. The structural vulnerabilities that accelerated financialization is creating in East Asia demonstrate the necessity of a post-Keynesian growth strategy based on redistribution and curbing financialization. The book also argues that in certain Northeast Asian economies the crisis has led to a consolidation of systems of industrial activism/state control, which could have occurred without accelerated financialization, and vice versa. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political economy and Asian studies.

Two Crises, Different Outcomes examines East Asian policy reactions to the two major crises of the last fifteen years: the global financial crisis of 2008–9 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. The calamity of the late 1990s saw a massive meltdown concentrated in East Asia. In stark contrast, East Asia avoided the worst effects of the Lehman Brothers collapse, incurring relatively little damage when compared to the financial devastation unleashed on North America and Europe. Much had changed across the intervening decade, not least that China rather than Japan had become the locomotive of regional growth, and that the East Asian economies had taken numerous steps to buffer their financial structures and regulatory regimes. This time Asia avoided disaster; it bounced back quickly after the initial hit and has been growing in a resilient fashion ever since. The authors of this book explain how the earlier financial crisis affected Asian economies, why government reactions differed so widely during that crisis, and how Asian economies weathered the Great Recession. Drawing on a mixture of single-country expertise and comparative analysis, they conclude by assessing the long-term prospects that Asian countries will continue their recent success.

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.

Global and Regional Strategies in the Middle East explores hegemony in the Middle East through understanding different dimensions of power politics and the consequences of the hegemonic ambitions of both global and regional powers. The book adds new aspects to the extensive literature on grand strategies in the Middle East by exploring and evaluating competing strategies from an "insider" perspective. First, it highlights the main determinants of Global powers' grand strategies, assesses the ones applied in the Middle East, and forecasts future strategies after the Ukraine war in alignment with other rival states' capabilities and goals. It then underlines regional dynamics and the hegemonic quest of regional powers and their power politics' determinants since the "War on terror," the Arab Spring, and, more recently, the Russian intervention in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza conflict. The book broadens readers' perspectives by clarifying the region's dynamics that shaped the global and regional power rivalries, where security concerns, economic interests, oil supplies, and hegemonic ambitions make it complicated for the US to keep influence and the total control it had during the late 20th century. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of the MENA region, International Relations and Strategic Studies.

The Impact of UNESCO on States' Cultural Policies focuses on the impact of the 2005 Convention on Diversity of Cultural Expressions on the cultural policies of eight states and substates, examining how they have integrated it into their own cultural policy. Cultural diversity presents a challenge for all governments. As migration increases and technology makes access to worldwide cultural products easier, governments seek to maintain a vibrant culture within their states or substates so that their populations can keep a strong sense of identity. Cultural policies become key to balance cultural diversity and national identity, or to promote them in parallel. The book addresses three main themes: how governments deal with cultural diversity, especially in their cultural policies; what the impact of an international convention on individual states’ policies is; and how different states’ status (i.e. size) on the international scene affects their implementation of an international convention. Providing a systematic comparative analysis, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of public policy, cultural policy and international organizations. It will also be useful to policymakers involved in cultural policy.

This book collects selected articles addressing several currently debated issues in the field of international macroeconomics. They focus on the role of the central banks in the debate on how to come to terms with the long-term decline in productivity growth, insufficient aggregate demand, high economic uncertainty and growing inequalities following the global financial crisis. Central banks are of considerable importance in this debate since understanding the sluggishness of the recovery process as well as its implications for the natural interest rate are key to assessing output gaps and the monetary policy stance. The authors argue that a more dynamic domestic and external aggregate demand helps to raise the inflation rate, easing the constraint deriving from the zero lower bound and allowing monetary policy to depart from its current ultra-accommodative position. Beyond macroeconomic factors, the book also discusses a supportive financial environment as a precondition for the rebound of global economic activity, stressing that understanding capital flows is a prerequisite for economic-policy decisions.

It is well known that Taiwan and South Korea, both former Japanese colonies, achieved rapid growth and industrialization after 1960. The performance of former European and American colonies (Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines) has been less impressive. Some scholars have attributed the difference to better infrastructure and greater access to education in Japan’s colonies. Anne Booth examines and critiques such arguments in this ambitious comparative study of economic development in East and Southeast Asia from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s. Booth takes an in-depth look at the nature and consequences of colonial policies for a wide range of factors, including the growth of export-oriented agriculture and the development of manufacturing industry. She evaluates the impact of colonial policies on the growth and diversification of the market economy and on the welfare of indigenous populations. Indicators such as educational enrollments, infant mortality rates, and crude death rates are used to compare living standards across East and Southeast Asia in the 1930s. Her analysis of the impact that Japan’s Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and later invasion and conquest had on the region and the living standards of its people leads to a discussion of the painful and protracted transition to independence following Japan’s defeat. Throughout Booth emphasizes the great variety of economic and social policies pursued by the various colonial governments and the diversity of outcomes. Lucidly and accessibly written, Colonial Legacies offers a balanced and elegantly nuanced exploration of a complex historical reality. It will be a lasting contribution to scholarship on the modern economic history of East and Southeast Asia and of special interest to those concerned with the dynamics of development and the history of colonial regimes. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.