There has been a major revival of interest in State Capitalism: What it is, where it is found, and why it is seemingly becoming more ubiquitous. As a concept, it has evolved from radical critiques of the Soviet Union, to being deployed by neo-liberals to describe market reforms deemed imperfect, to settle into a middle ground, as a pragmatic way to describe the state assuming a role as an active economic agent, in addition to its regulatory, social, and security functions. The latter is the central focus of this book, although due attention is accorded to the origins of state capitalism and how it has changed over the years, as well as contemporary ways in which state capitalism may be theorized. This economic agency may assume direct forms, for example, via state owned enterprises. However, it may also be indirect, for example, actively serving private interests through promoting insider firms, who may occupy monopolistic market positions and perform outsourced state functions. In turn, this leads to raise salient governance questions. The latter may encompass agency tensions between public ownership, and political or even private interest control; it may also include issues of transparency and monitoring. Although state capitalism has often been depicted as the preserve of states in the global south, be they developmental or predatory, many forms of state capitalism are visible in mature economies, be they liberal or coordinated, and this is not always associated with superior governance arrangements; indeed, this is an area where clear and easy divisions between the developing or emerging world and the developed or mature world may increasingly be breaking down. This volume brings together the accounts of leading experts from around the world; it is explicitly multi-disciplinary, and both consolidates the exiting knowledge base, and provides new, novel, and counter-intuitive insights.

The financial crisis that began in 2008 and its lingering aftermath have caused many intellectuals and politicians to question the virtues of capitalist systems. The 19 original essays in this handbook, written by leading scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe, analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of capitalist systems. The volume opens with essays on the historical and legal origins of capitalism. These are followed by chapters describing the nature, institutions, and advantages of capitalism: entrepreneurship, innovation, property rights, contracts, capital markets, and the modern corporation. The next set of chapters discusses the problems that can arise in capitalist systems including monopoly, principal agent problems, financial bubbles, excessive managerial compensation, and empire building through wealth-destroying mergers. Two subsequent essays examine in detail the properties of the "Asian model" of capitalism as exemplified by Japan and South Korea, and capitalist systems where ownership and control are largely separated as in the United States and United Kingdom. The handbook concludes with an essay on capitalism in the 21st century by Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps.

This text provides an introduction to the ways in which five different disciplines have approached the study of business and government. It examines how business interacts with government in different parts of the world, including the United States, the EU, China, Japan and South America.

The Handbook explores institutional variations across the political economies of different societies within Asia. It includes empirical analysis of 13 major Asian business systems between India and Japan, and examines these in a comparative, historical, and theoretical context.

Over its lifetime, 'political economy' has had different meanings. This handbook views political economy as a synthesis of the various strands of social science, treating it as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behaviour and institutions.

Business is one of the major power centres in modern society. The state seeks to check and channel that power so as to serve broader public policy objectives. However, if the way in which business is governed is ineffective or over burdensome, it may become more difficult to achieve desired goals such as economic growth or higher levels of employment. In a period of international economic crisis, the study of how business and government relate to each other in different countries is of more central importance than ever. These relationships have been studied from a number of different disciplinary perspectives - business studies, economics, economic history, law, and political science - and all of these are represented in this handbook. The first part of the book provides an introduction to the ways in which five different disciplines have approached the study of business and government. The second section, on the firm and the state, looks at how these entities interact in different settings, emphasising such phenomena as the global firm and varieties of capitalism. The third section examines how business interacts with government in different parts of the world, including the United States, the EU, China, Japan and South America. The fourth section reviews changing patterns of market governance through a unifying theme of the role of regulation. Business-government relations can play out in divergent ways in different policy and the fifth section examines the contrasts between different key arenas such as competition policy, trade policy, training policy and environmental policy. The volume provides an authoritative overview with chapters by leading authorities on the current state of knowledge of business-government relations, but also points to ways in which this work might be developed in the future, e.g., through a political theory of the firm.

This handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of business groups around the world. It focuses on the adaptive and competitive capabilities of business groups and their evolutionary dynamics, as well as considering the historical and theoretical contexts of business groups.