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China’s experience over the past decades is not just a story of economic growth, it is also one of institutional change. The current political-economic system is a bureaucratic market system, in which the government and the market both coexist and conflict with each other. This book gives a detailed description of the institutional evolution in China, using large amounts of documents and cases. The book provides a theory explaining the origin of China’s reform, the political and economic forces driving the reform, and the reasoning behind the stagnation and turn-over of reform.

This book demonstrates how exporters’ decisions regarding choice of invoice currency can be influenced by many factors including firm size, product competitiveness, intra/inter-firm trades, and the geography of export destination. The aim is to enhance our understanding of exporters’ behavior in terms of managing currency risk. It contains detailed research and insightful data focusing on Japanese exporters and shows how they face an important trade-off in choosing the invoice currency. If exports are invoiced in yen, then exchange rate fluctuations will pass through to retail prices ultimately affecting sales volumes. However, if they choose to invoice in the importer’s currency, then sales volumes are largely unchanged.

During recent decades, Korea has been one of only a handful of countries that have made the successful transformation to become a developed nation by simultaneously achieving persistent economic growth combined with a democratic political system. Experts and political leaders worldwide have attributed this achievement to investments in people or, in other words, the power of education. Whilst numerous books have highlighted the role of industrial policies, technological growth, and international trade in Korea’s development process, this is one of the first to focus on the role of human capital. It shows how the accumulation of human capital aided transformation and helps explain the policies, strategies and challenges that Korea faces now and in the future.

Foreign Direct Investment and the Chinese Economy provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of foreign direct investment, with extensive empirical evidence, on the Chinese economy over the last three and a half decades.

This book makes the bold attempt at proposing a new general theory of economic development. The main premise is that economic institutions and policies must embody ‘economic discrimination’ if there is to be any chance of real economic development. By economic discrimination, the author means ‘treating differences differently’ by selecting and supporting economic entities and behaviour that contribute positively to the economy. The book identifies markets, government and corporations as the ‘holy trinity of economic development’, that is, the three most important institutions that must work together via economic discrimination to steer the economy towards real transformative progress. The book also warns against the current trend of economic egalitarianism or ‘not treating differences differently’ because it destroys economic incentives and results in an array of economic problems including growth stagnation.

Resource security is a new battleground in the international politics of the Asia-Pacific. With demand for minerals and energy surging, disputes are emerging over access and control of scarce natural resource endowments. Drawing on critical insights from political economy, this book explains why resources have emerged as a source of inter-state conflict in the region.