This book re-visits the phenomenon of Japanese secular stagnation in light of the fate of the North Atlantic and developing economies and places it in a longer historical political and geopolitical economy of capitalism from a variety of political and disciplinary perspectives. Japanese capitalism, which was once an admired model of miraculous growth with a relatively egalitarian distribution of income, fell into secular stagnation in the early 1990s. The phenomenon has since fascinated observers, provoked debates, provided policy advocates with grist for the mills of a range of policy proposals, some of them mutually contradictory, and, most importantly, burdened an entire population, and particularly its young. Japan’s secular stagnation has raised new questions about policy difficulties on a range of fronts – dramatically lowered growth rate despite comparatively high investment, deteriorating labor conditions, rising class and gender inequality, a profound and many-faceted crisis of social reproduction and a deepening fiscal crisis of the state – all of which have important international ramifications. Moreover, interest in and the importance of Japan’s secular stagnation grew rapidly after 2008 as many have sought to understand the economic malaise of the North Atlantic by analogy and comparison with all or parts of the Japanese condition. The introduction and chapters in this book attempt to understand the causes, character and consequence of that original affliction. They also reflect on the meaning of Japan’s secular stagnation at this stage of development capitalism. The result contains the key to understanding the more widespread economic malaise of our time. This book will be a beneficial read for researchers and scholars of Economics and Politics interested in Japanese Studies as well as the Japanese political economy. Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Japanese Political Economy. The last chapter was originally published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.

This book re-visits the phenomenon of Japanese secular stagnation in light of the fate of the North Atlantic and developing economies and places it in a longer historical political and geopolitical economy of capitalism from a variety of political and disciplinary perspectives. Japanese capitalism, which was once an admired model of miraculous growth with a relatively egalitarian distribution of income, fell into secular stagnation in the early 1990s. The phenomenon has since fascinated observers, provoked debates, provided policy advocates with grist for the mills of a range of policy proposals, some of them mutually contradictory, and, most importantly, burdened an entire population, and particularly its young. Japan's secular stagnation has raised new questions about policy difficulties on a range of fronts - dramatically lowered growth rate despite comparatively high investment, deteriorating labor conditions, rising class and gender inequality, a profound and many-faceted crisis of social reproduction and a deepening fiscal crisis of the state - all of which have important international ramifications. Moreover, interest in and the importance of Japan's secular stagnation grew rapidly after 2008 as many have sought to understand the economic malaise of the North Atlantic by analogy and comparison with all or parts of the Japanese condition. The introduction and chapters in this book attempt to understand the causes, character and consequence of that original affliction. They also reflect on the meaning of Japan's secular stagnation at this stage of development capitalism. The result contains the key to understanding the more widespread economic malaise of our time. This book will be a beneficial read for researchers and scholars of Economics and Politics interested in Japanese Studies as well as the Japanese political economy. Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Japanese Political Economy. The last chapter was originally published in theJournal of Contemporary Asia.

The revised edition of this highly acclaimed work presents crucial lessons from Japan's recession that could aid the US and other economies as they struggle to recover from the current financial crisis. This book is about Japan's 15-year long recession and how it affected current theoretical thinking about its causes and cures. It has a detailed explanation on what happened to Japan, but the discoveries made are so far-reaching that a large portion of economics literature will have to be modified to accommodate another half to the macroeconomic spectrum of possibilities that conventional theorists have overlooked. The author developed the idea of yin and yang business cycles where the conventional world of profit maximization is the yang and the world of balance sheet recession, where companies are minimizing debt, is the yin. Once so divided, many varied theories developed in macro economics since the 1930s can be nicely categorized into a single comprehensive theory- The Holy Grail of Macro Economics

"Thought provoking and fresh - this book challenges how we think about economics.” Gillian Tett, Financial Times For further information about recent publicity events and media coverage for Rethinking Capitalism please visit http://marianamazzucato.com/rethinking-capitalism/ Western capitalism is in crisis. For decades investment has been falling, living standards have stagnated or declined, and inequality has risen dramatically. Economic policy has neither reformed the financial system nor restored stable growth. Climate change meanwhile poses increasing risks to future prosperity. In this book some of the world’s leading economists propose new ways of thinking about capitalism. In clear and compelling prose, each chapter shows how today’s deep economic problems reflect the inadequacies of orthodox economic theory and the failure of policies informed by it. The chapters examine a range of contemporary economic issues, including fiscal and monetary policy, financial markets and business behaviour, inequality and privatisation, and innovation and environmental change. The authors set out alternative economic approaches which better explain how capitalism works, why it often doesn’t, and how it can be made more innovative, inclusive and sustainable. Outlining a series of far-reaching policy reforms, Rethinking Capitalism offers a powerful challenge to mainstream economic debate, and new ideas to transform it.

Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

Why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? The authors combine economic theory and historical evidence to argue that political processes drove the economic divergence between the two world regions, with continued consequences today that become clear in this innovative account.

A commanding survey of the world economy from 1950 to the present, from the author of the acclaimed The Boom and the Bubble.

Spiralling inequality since the 1970s and the global financial crisis of 2008 have been the two most important challenges to democratic capitalism since the Great Depression. To understand the political economy of contemporary Europe and America we must, therefore, put inequality and crisis at the heart of the picture. In this innovative new textbook Mattias Vermeiren does just this, demonstrating that both the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis resulted from a mutually reinforcing but ultimately unsustainable relationship between countries with debt-led and export-led growth models, models fundamentally shaped by soaring income and wealth inequality. He traces the emergence of these two growth models by giving a comprehensive overview, deeply informed by the comparative and international political economy literature, of recent developments in the four key domains that have shaped the dynamics of crisis and inequality: macroeconomic policy, social policy, corporate governance and financial policy. He goes on to assess the prospects for the emergence of a more egalitarian and sustainable form of democratic capitalism. This fresh and insightful overview of contemporary Western capitalism will be essential reading for all students and scholars of international and comparative political economy.

This book proposes a new way to approach comparative international development by focusing on time and timing in economic and social development. The UK industrialized over two centuries, and then started to de-industrialize in the late 1960s. Today, the most rapid developers experience aspects of industrialization and de-industrialization simultaneously. It is no longer clear that industrialization offers the path of growth it once did; industrialization has become 'thin.' Demographic and social challenges that earlier developers faced sequentially now come at the same time. Rapid growers experience compression most acutely, but the spatial and temporal fusing of past and present is widespread, affecting high-, middle-, and lower-income countries alike. Timing refers to the differences in historical periods in which development takes place. The geopolitical, institutional and technological environment for countries recently integrated into the global economy has been vastly different from that of the preceding postwar decades of 'embedded liberalism,' although it does contain echoes of the 'first globalization' and 'first financialization' a century ago. The first era of liberalism did not end well, and the second is similarly foundering on the rocks of nationalism and protectionism, as it is being battered by a global pandemic. The authors propose an interdisciplinary conceptual framework based on co-evolving state-market and organization-technology dyads, which will help readers make sense of contemporary development across multiple societies, sectors and geographies, and provide a template for historical comparison.