Comparative Political Economy in East Asia after the 1997-98 Economic Crisis

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24330041
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Politics
• Research Institution: National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
• Principal Investigator: TSUNEKAWA Keiichi 政策研究大学院大学, 政策研究科, 特別教授 (80134401)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): ONISHI Yutaka 神戸大学, 大学院法学研究科, 教授 (90254375) ; MIYAKE Yasuyuki 関西学院大学, 国際学部, 教授 (50363908) ; MATSUMOTO Mitsutoyo 天理大学, 国際学部, 教授 (00335415) ; KAWANO Motoko 政策研究大学院大学, 政策研究科, 研究助手 (80552017)
• Research Collaborator: OKABE Yasunobu JICA研究所, 主任研究員 (00511445)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: ポリティカル・エコノミー / 中所得国の罠 / 東アジア / タイ / マレーシア / 韓国 / 台湾 / 中国

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The East Asian countries (except Japan) achieved the V-shaped recovery through efforts to liberalize trade and investment, improve the technological capacity, and to make the labor market more flexible. These reforms never progressed through the automatic corrective mechanism of the market but were realized through political coordination of interests among big enterprises, SMEs, farmers, workers, and socially vulnerable people. The content and effectiveness of the reforms vary reflecting different political institutions and different state-society relations in these countries. However, they are converging in the point that political coordination of interests is increasingly difficult due to the trade-off relations existing between trade liberalization (and/or the labor market reform) and the enhancement of social welfare programs and between the short-term increase of returns for individual enterprises and the long-term improvement of the national capacity for technological innovation.

Free Research Field

政治学