Political Economy Quarterly
Online ISSN : 2189-7719
Print ISSN : 1882-5184
ISSN-L : 1882-5184
Volume 52, Issue 2
Displaying 1-19 of 19 articles from this issue
  • Article type: Cover
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages Cover1-
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • Shozaburo SAKAI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 3-4
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • Toshio YAMADA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 5-15
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    A quarter of a century has passed since the former socialist countries began their transition to the market economy. Transition economics focused at first on analyzing transitional strategies (shock therapy or gradual reforms), then on comparative analyses of transition consequences (attainment levels of institutional reforms and economic performances), and more recently on the question of "state capitalism," especially as observed in China and Russia. The term "state capitalism" was brought into the limelight by I. Bremmer in his book, The End of the Free Market, 2010. He defines state capitalism as "a system in which the state plays the role of leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain." According to him, state capitalism is opposed to the "free-market capitalism" established in the advanced economies. In the history of social sciences, the concept of state capitalism has been defined in many ways. Bremmer's definition is original in that it understands state capitalism as an important type of contemporary capitalism, which has negative connotations as a political rent-seeking system. His concept has merit in that it can highlight the problems of political corruption in transitional and emerging market economies as well. However, his typology of "free-market capitalism" and "state capitalism" is too naive a dichotomy; he only presents the "challenge" of state capitalism to the free market, without pointing out the problems of the "free market" under the dominance of neoliberalism and global financiers. In this study, we, on the one hand, explain using the regulationist concept of "mode of regulation", the reasons and manner in which state capitalism can nevertheless grow and survive, and, on the other, clarify, from the standpoint of "civil society", difficulties that weigh heavily on both state capitalism and the free market in its contemporary form.
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  • Satoshi MIZOBATA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 16-30
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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    This paper analyses state capitalism in Russia from the viewpoint of state capital and state functions. As far as the Russia's government size (number of public servants and financial expenditures of the public sector) equals to those in developed countries, it cannot be applied as a precise indicator to characterize state capitalism. On the other side, both the state capital as a market player and the state functions can be regarded as qualitative characteristics of the Russian capitalism. As for the state capital, both privatization and state intervention have coexisted, and have simultaneously functioned for "controlling the highlands (the mainstay of state)". Moreover, the 2008 global economic crisis authorized state intervention. In order to maintain global competitiveness, the government has established strategic enterprises and has implemented preferential measures. Even though the state sector in the economy has decreased, it has enhanced its intervention into the private sector of the economy. The state has a strong influence on the economy via holding shares and regulations. Particularly, state-owned enterprises have changed their enterprise type from state corporations and unitary enterprises to joint-stock companies. In addition, "the exchange system of interests (state capture and business capture)" has been established and the state capital has openly showed its new "internationalization" behavior. The state capital has close ties with the global financial flows and it has stipulated the emergence of Russia's multinationals that are deeply connected with tax havens. Despite the offshore problem, the state sector is deeply linked with the global network and, therefore, state capitalism cannot exist without linkages with the global market. With regards to authoritarian political regime, concentration of powers, and existence of oil and gas rents, Russia is none other than state capitalism. However, functions and quality (good governance) of the state capitalism are far behind other developed countries. The Russian state is inferior in terms of state functions and state quality; the state as a coordinator of interests by grabbing hands may not be regarded as a strong one. Thus, Russia (Putin's regime) cannot be referred as "a normal middle income democratic country". Finally, low quality and authoritarian regime are mutually complementary in Russia, and the legacy inherited from the past also aff ected institutionalization of low quality state and institutional complementarities. State capitalism has also balanced interests among players. Why has state capitalism spread into the emerging and transition economies? The state sector has become a tool to correct the distorted markets. The basis of the Russian state capitalism is its global linkages with global markets (WTO accession), low-quality state coordination of oligarchs' behavior, and premature financial markets. This state intervention is old style, but it is a new phenomenon from the viewpoint of global adaptation. Global trends are common among other transition economies. However, the Russian case is based on its own historical and social thought. Thus, being both "old" and "new," Russian state capitalism seems resilient.
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  • Hiroshi TANAKA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 31-41
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Does Hungary, one small EU member country located in the Central Eastern Europe, metamorphose into state capitalism? To study his topic is a main task of this paper. This task makes us, however, realize that almost any one did not recognize in the 1990s where Hungary would arrive at through the systemic transformation and preparing for joining the EU, with becoming aware that Hungary had four systemic change tasks to be solved: restoring the national independence and sovereignty, political democratization, joining the EU and transforming into a market economy. More than two decades of transformative struggles show us that capitalisms in Central Easter Europe seem to have been converted into a diff erent type of capitalism from those in Western Europe and that Hungarian capitalism becomes a different type among Central East European countries in many terms. The unorthodox economic reforms and policies implemented by Fidesz governmental party and its leader Victor Orban after 2010 are not only called 'Orbanomics', but also criticized as state capitalism both inside and outside of Hungary. This paper sheds light on whether and in what terms Hungary is turned into state capitalism. The second part of this paper, following the introduction, first, conducts book and literature reviews, second, discusses state capitalism in the 19th century and 20th century, and then defines state capitalism 3.0 in the 21st century, characterizing its particular features of newly and successfully entering into the world market, and multi-nationalizing of firms with the various helps and supports by the state organs and institutions. The third part describes actual historical processes of the systemic transformation in Hungarian economy from the end of 1980s till the beginning of 2010s, focusing on significant influences upon Hungarian economy exercised by the EU integration, Global Financial and Economic Crisis, and Euro Crisis along with the results of national election every four years. And then the fourth part, uncovering emergent relationships between the state and economic-business circles, examines activities of Hungarian emerging multinationals and re-nationalization movements of firms and public services. Finally, the fourth part reaches conclusions and considers some implications for further studies concerning on this topic. The conclusions summerize characteristic features of Hungarian economy as state capitalism in terms that the state has changed and expanded its role in economic development and interventions, like suspending functions of checks & balances on the state activities, giving (un)preferential treatments to specific groups, increasing the state ownership's share, increasing influences of the state upon newly emerging sectors, abolishing decentralised decision-making, centralizing decision-making and thier competences, changing institutional frameworks of regulations, increasing state-regulations of prices, increasing state regulations and state-capitals especially in the financial sectors, and moving public service activities from under market norms to under the state management and regulations. It reveals legacies of state socialism and traces of neo-liberal type of privatization and market liberalization, providing the evidences to show state capitalism 3.0 in Hungary. In addition it includes new unconventional features of taking special tax measures and regulations on bank-financial sectors. And finally, the paper reconfirms the necessity to look at Hungarian capitalism not only from the state capitalism perspective, but also from the mixed multiple perspectives.
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  • LEI SONG
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 42-49
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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    It is true that the government plays important roles in the process of China's economic growth. However, because the advocates of theories of Chinese economic model and Chinese State Capitalism fail to provide an applicable analytical framework, the roles of government are exaggerated. Inspired by the reinterpretation of James Abegglen's research about so-called Japan. Inc, this essay aims to understand China's economic growth and the roles of government by discussing the relationship between the governmental capacity and corporate capability. Concretely, after classifying the governmental capacity into imposing capacity and inducing capacity and dividing the corporate capability into production capacity and technical capability separately, we analyze how these kinds of governmental capacity and corporate capability interact in different sectors. The main findings can be summarized as the following three points. First, compared to SOE, for private firms or multinational firms, the eff ect of governmental capacity over corporate capability is limited. Second, although the governmental capacity shapes the corporate capability to a large extend in the non manufacturing sector, the eff ect of governmental capacity over corporate capability is not crucial in the manufacturing sector. Third, in the manufacturing sector, the governmental capacity contributes to the formation of production capacity, but the linkage between intervention and accumulation of technical capability is weak.
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  • Do Manh Hong
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 50-63
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Vietnam seems play good performance on economic development in the last three decades, and be ranked as lower middle income economy from the end of 2010. Undoubtedly, under a series of deregulation and economic liberalization policies since early of 1990s both of foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic private capital enterprises (PVEs) have contributed largely to the development of the economy. However along with such the positive eff ects, the current social economic development policies of Vietnam revealed some negative effects on the long term economic growth of the country. Some recent works, such as ADB (2011), Ono (2011) etc, warned Vietnamese economy hidden some structural causes that may push it fall into a middle income trap (in which the income can not be improved to higher level) in the near future. The diminishing of GDP growth rate of Vietnam in the last two three years (from 7-8% down to 5-6%) may be the factual evidence of such warning. This paper focused on the fundamental causes of these structural problems of current Vietnamese economy, not by a pure economics sense but from a political economic approach by analysing the changes of economic development strategy of the government, based on the two basic concepts of state capitalism and crony capitalism. The hypothesis here is that, Vietnamese goverment (state) tried to introduce market mechanism as a tool for governing the economy, until middle of the first decade of 2000s, by its own way with the emphasis of the role of state capital, so-called state capitalism. However the strategy using government's power in order to rule over the economy, via state owned enterprise system (SOEs), has not run as well as expected. After WTO accession (from the end of 2006), the change of economic policies with further market liberalization under the rules of WTO has positive eff ects on development of FDI and PVEs sectors, in the sense of stimulation for profit seeking activities. But the mix of SOEs protection policies under the rules of dictatorial political system, and the new wave of market liberalization has created favourite conditions for rent seeking activities, which nourish reproduction of crony capitalism. As a result, this causes the structural problems for long term economic development of the country. The rest of the paper tried to verify the above hypothesis by examination of economic policies on the development of SOEs, PVEs and FDI via three periods, i) 1986-1999 - known as the first Doi Moi (economic innovation), ii) 2000-2006 - the second Doi moi, and iii) 2007-2014 - after accession of WTO, be called as the third Doi moi. The end of paper emphasised that, further progress on innovation of political economic system is indispensable for the long term social economic development of the country, but the more important issue is how to make the economy to be governed by "the rule of law" spirit.
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  • Soshi TAKEDA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 64-76
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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    This paper explores how multinationals producing intermediate goods affect underdeveloped regions through the generation of supporting industry there by modifying the technology gap model which was built by Grossman & Helpman [1991] and Grass & Sagg [1998]. The main issue is that regions have two diff erent unreversible development pathways. When the region has wide initial technology gap between multinationals and domestic firms, the principal industry there is occupied with multinationals even the region succeed the economic development. Moreover, in that condition, some policies for increasing absorptive capacity to generate technology transfer and linkages, such as the education or the training of workers, become ineffectual due to the indeterminancy caused by a complex mechanism of the interaction in the wide range of that absorptive capacity to cover the wide technology gap. It would be wider the technology gap between multinationals and domestic firms rather than narrower it. Past studies showed that wide initial technology gap must be filled with increasing absorptive capacity to be realized technology transfer. However, this paper stresses that this must be done within a limited time to avoid the region progressing the other unreversible development pathways. As for the model, this has three unique points. The first one is that this model focuses the developing country which has never succeeded technology transfer enough such as Mexico. The second one is that multinationals and domestic firms achieve technology transfer by diff erent means (imitation and learning by doing) to reflect the recognition of absorptive capacity on this paper, particularly capital goods industry. Finally, there are multinationals producing intermediate goods in the model. These multinationals express east and south-east Asian multinationals which are expanding all over the world these days.
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  • Hiroyuki UNI, Natsuka TOKUMARU
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 77-87
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Since the 1990s, an increasing number of Japanese enterprises and organizations have introduced performance-based pay to increase their labor productivity. However, some empirical studies show that performance-based pay does not always work as intended. This is partly due to workers' dissatisfaction with their performance evaluations. One hypothesis as to why performance-based pay does not work as intended may be derived from Marx's observations on workers' fairness ideals in the modern collaborative labor process: each labor process is mutually connected and each worker's output is dependent on that of others. The second hypothesis we derive is from an empirical analysis by Cole and Webb; that is, the measurability of individuals' performance is a necessary requirement for workers' commitment to performance-based remuneration. To examine these two hypotheses, we performed economic experiments comprising a production stage and a distribution stage. In our experiment, each participant joined a two-player team and engaged in calculation tasks to earn some amount of individual earnings. Each participant then distributed the total earnings of his team with his pair. We set up four treatments with different production modes (collaborative or independent) and different conditions of individuals' performance information (disclosure or nondisclosure). Further, we examined which fairness ideals among selfish, performance-based or egalitarian individuals prefer to commit in a distribution stage. Our experimental results showed that a significant number of subjects engaged in collaborative production prefer to commit egalitarian distribution and are less selfish, compared with those engaged in independent production modes. It is also observed that a significant number of participants privy to other's performance information prefer performance-based pay, whereas those without other's information prefer an egalitarian distribution. Our experimental results collaborate the above two hypotheses and partly explain recent failures in performance-based pay systems, i.e., workers do not commit to performance-based pay in workplaces where the labor process is collaborative, and it is difficult to correctly measure an individual's performance.
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  • Nobuharu YOKOKAWA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 88-91
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Kenshiro NINOMIYA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 92-94
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Yahilo UNNO
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 95-97
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Hiroshi NISHI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 98-100
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Tsuyoshi YUKI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 101-103
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Toshikazu YAMAKAWA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 104-106
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Hideo SATO
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 107-109
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Masayoshi TATEBE
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 110-112
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Kiyoshi NAGATANI
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 113-115
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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  • Michiaki OBATA
    Article type: Article
    2015 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 116-118
    Published: July 20, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: July 03, 2017
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