Comparative Political Economy

"Business history can be a valuable, even critical element in teaching international management – not only at elite institutions and at postgraduate level, but at universities of applied sciences and in undergraduate education, too. It is specifically relevant for programs with a focus on Europe. Students should be given a chance to discover common and connected pasts of European enterprise. The article offers a rationale for curriculum integration and discusses case selections and teaching methods for non-historians. Five exemplary themes are presented: East India companies, financial market bubbles, telegraphy, the Suez Canal, and the emergence of airlines.
Zusammenfassung
Unternehmensgeschichte kann ein wertvoller, sogar kritischer Beitrag in der Vermittlung des internationalen Managements sein – nicht nur an elitären Einrichtungen und im Master, sondern auch an Fachhochschulen und in Bachelor-Studiengängen. Besonders relevant ist sie für Studiengänge mit Fokus Europa. Studenten sollten eine Chance erhalten, die gemeinsame und zusammenhängende Vergangenheit europäischer Unternehmenstätigkeit zu entdecken. Der Artikel begründet die Integration ins Curriculum und diskutiert Fallauswahl und Lehrmethodik für Nichthistoriker. Eine exemplarische Auswahl von fünf Themen wird gezeigt: Ostindienkompanien, Finanzmarkt-Blasen, Telegrafie, der Suezkanal und die Entstehung von Fluggesellschaften.
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""Why have Americans, who by a clear majority approve of unions, been joining them in smaller numbers than ever before? This book answers that question by comparing the American experience with that of Canada, where approval for unions is significantly lower than in the United States, but where since the mid-1960s workers have joined organized labor to a much greater extent. Given that the two countries are outwardly so similar, what explains this paradox? This book provides a detailed comparative analysis of both countries using, among other things, a detailed survey conducted in the United States and Canada by the Ipsos-Reid polling group.

The authors explain that the relative reluctance of employees in the United States to join unions, compared with those in Canada, is rooted less in their attitudes toward unions than in the former country's deep-seated tradition of individualism and laissez-faire economic values. Canada has a more statist, social democratic tradition, which is in turn attributable to its Tory and European conservative lineage. Canadian values are therefore more supportive of unionism, making unions more powerful and thus, paradoxically, lowering public approval of unions. Public approval is higher in the United States, where unions exert less of an influence over politics and the economy.""

"Post Crisis Economic Governance and Reform
The aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis continues to frame political and economic debate.  The three papers in this panel relate to different aspects of the post-crisis period.
Panel Chair: Dr Andrew Baker (Queen's University Belfast)
Panel Discussant: Professor Michael Moran (University of Manchester Business School)

Panel Members:
• Professor Andrew Hindmoor (University of Sheffield) 'Masters of the Universe but Slaves of the Market: Competition and Crisis'.
• Dr Helen Thompson (University of Cambridge) 'The Missing Party: the European banks, the Financial crisis, and the Euro Zone'.
• Professor Ben Clift (University of Warwick) 'Its Mostly Fiscal: Post Crisis Economic Governance, IMF/Advanced Economy Relations and Evolving Fiscal Policy Ideas'.
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This paper analyses the political economy of the Hollande Presidency in France, evaluating the economic policies pursued by the French Socialist President since May 2012. It explains the limited coherence and success of economic policy under Hollande in terms of constraints operating at domestic and European levels, and through credibility concerns of financial markets. Domestically, it highlights difficulties managing the presidential majority, notably due to presidentialised factionalism within French Socialism. At the European level it explores disagreements within the Franco-German relationship over which economic ideas should underpin macroeconomic policies to tackle Europe’s recession and efforts to resolve the Eurozone crisis.

The current literature on comparative political economy does not seem to consider unifying the analysis of continuity and change in industrialized and semi-industrialized economies under a single theoretical framework. On the one hand, major comparative institutionally-based works derive their theoretical propositions from dynamics in the Western world. On the other, studies that are focused on national trajectories of development are concentrated in cross-national comparisons among countries with similar characteristics in what concerns strategies of development. In this paper, I argue that, in industrialized and semi-industrialized societies, all fields in the world of social action are pervaded by two major fields, hereby dubbed metafields: public and private, which are in a constant “double movement” to shape each other boundaries through the definition of social and property rights that regulate access to knowledge and capital. Both are metafields because they constrain human action and the organization of structures in market, civil society, and political arena in any capitalist society.

The current literature on comparative political economy does not seem to consider unifying under a single theoretical framework the analysis of continuity and change in different economic systems. On the one hand, major comparative works derive their theoretical propositions from dynamics in the Western world. On the other, studies that are focused on national trajectories of development are concentrated in cross-national comparisons involving countries with similar characteristics in what concerns strategies of development. In this paper, I argue that all fields in the world of social action are pervaded by two major fields, hereby dubbed ‘meta-fields’: public and private. Both are in a ‘double movement’ to shape each other's boundaries through the definition of social and property rights that regulate access to human capabilities and capital. Public and private are meta-fields because they constrain human action and the organization of social configurations on state and non-state levels.

This paper analyzes the role of different forms of social capital in privatization in regions of Ukraine. Several recent studies linked regional government performance and economic development in Italy, Germany, Poland, and other countries to social capital, which is associated with different historical experiences. In post-communist Ukraine, regional political cleavages are also often traced to historical divisions. This paper examines whether different historical experiences in two groups of regions, those which were under Russian and then Soviet rule, and those which were under Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule until World War II, contributed to variations in the rate and quality of privatization. This study distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative aspects of social capital and privatization in industry and agriculture in Ukrainian regions. Statistical analysis of the 1995 World Values Survey data and aggregate data are used to analyze effects of historical experience and other direct and indirect measures of social capital, such as membership in voluntary organizations, interpersonal trust, importance of family and friends, and crime and divorce rates, on privatization in Ukraine. The role of social capital in privatization is compared to the role of other factors including economic policy, industrial structure, human capital, and ethnic cleavages.

"This dissertation uses an empirical study of the lifetime employment system in four large Japanese corporations and the principal work values of their core white-collar university graduate male employees to inform a theoretical discussion on the nature of modernity and capitalism in contemporary Japan. As such, therefore, it lies within the academic disciplines of sociology and Japanese studies.

For some time now the lifetime employment principle has been the ideological and functional basis of the Japanese management system. However, due to the steadily accumulating stresses exerted by the further intensification and globalisation of economic competition, coupled with changes in Japanese society stimulated by the achievement of material abundance, Japanese corporations feel they are under increasing pressure to implement fundamental changes to the system of employment. For their part, employees are adopting a more independent, critical, and reflexive employment orientation.

Making use of both Western and Japanese theoretical representations, and contrasting the post-war paradigm of employment security and stability within a rapidly growing economy with the present period of corporate restructuring and economic stagnation, the dissertation posits a hypothesis that Japanese society is undergoing a period of systemic and cultural transformation that lies between a post-war “transitional” and a global “hybrid” modernity. That is to say, the post-war Japanese company can be said to have possessed both modern and fictive pre-modern attributes and was thus a “trans-modern” corporation. Moreover, the present period of corporate rationalisation, together with the progressive modernisation of the Japanese salaryman’s work and career consciousness, signifies that the Japanese corporation is entering an age characterised by a global hybrid form of capitalist modernity."

"Abstract
Forthcoming in Review of International Political Economy 2014 Pre-print version
Manuela Moschella
manuela.moschella@unito.it
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on how advanced economies reacted to large post-crisis capital inflows. Focusing on the Swiss case, the paper shows that capital controls do not exhaust the list of unorthodox policies adopted since the start of the crisis. The revival of foreign exchange interventions and the introduction of explicit exchange rate targets also figure prominently in this list as attested by the decisions adopted by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) since 2009. Why did the SNB decide to intervene in the forex market and introduce an exchange rate floor? Why did the SNB decide to gamble with its highly-valued anti-inflationary reputation in its attempt to stem the rise of the franc? In answering these questions, this paper suggests a broader and more complete explanation than one which focuses solely on the configuration of domestic interests. Specifically, the paper argues that a thorough explanation of the SNB’s response requires taking into account the changing monetary paradigm of the central banking community. This emerging monetary paradigm influenced the SNB’s policy decisions, as it made the SNB particularly sensitive to financial stability risks and provided the central bank with the (macroprudential) tools to manage them.
Keywords: currency wars; monetary policy; exchange rate policy; central banking; ideational change; Switzerland."

The central claim of this essay is that the political economies in contemporary China and Viet Nam represent instances of a distinctive kind of political economy – or regime – that is best characterized as market-Leninist. In market-Leninist regimes market economic institutions and market-based strategies of economic accumulation exist in subordination to Leninist political institutions and ideology. This specific combination of institutional attributes and its attendant effects on welfare, stratification, and political consciousness is what distinguishes market-Leninist regimes from other forms of political economy. This essay identifies properties of market-Leninist regimes, examines their evolution, and considers their significance in comparative historical terms. It reflects on future prospects of market-Leninist regimes and the value and limitations of the concept for social theory. In so doing, the essay aims to understand theoretically Market-Leninism's “styles of domination” and by extension how social inequalities in contemporary China and Viet Nam in the past and the present have been instituted, reproduced, and transformed.