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* The Invisible Hand? How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined since A.D. 500By Bas Van BavelNew York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Pp. xi, 330. $60 cloth.Economic historian Bas Van Bavel [...]

We explore how macro and micro networks influence the diffusion of technological innovation and cultural/social behavior. Across the historical regimes in China and Europe, dynastic lordship's macro networks afforded different advantages in technological innovation. A network particular to Europe, the Roman Church, extended deep into local parishes with ethical norms prescribing fairness to strangers, and these cultural foundations helped guilds, trade associations, merchant courts, and universities operate cooperatively far beyond kinship. In contrast, Chinese emperors relied on ancient Confucian moral codes and system-spanning Confucian-educated officialdom; but fiscal limitations compelled officials to defer to local lineage orders, resulting in an enduring cultural pattern of guanxi and a polity whose institutional problem-solving capacity falter beyond the local level. Yet the civil service system has enabled China to outperform similar lineage-dependent regimes. Probing network topologies, we find that system-spanning networks can facilitate technological diffusion, but local networks influence cultural and behavioral change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EVENTS of September 111,2001 have led, among many other things, to the revival of an old debate about the relationship between poverty and political extremism. To get at the [...]

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Amid the chaos, Indonesia is inching toward political and economic change. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 1997, reports of economic, political, ethno-religious, and military conflict occurring in [...]

This article demonstrates that the network structures of historical regimes influence the way information is spread, which in turn circumscribe the behaviors of the different groups that make up the system. It advances two central claims. The first is a methodological one showing that patterns of long-term historical change are best studied at the system level, rather than by a traditional equilibrium framework grounded in models of individual behavior. Then, an empirical claim is established by comparisons of China's hub-and-spoke hypernetwork with Europe's multi-hub hypernetwork to show that their different patterns of interconnectivity forged their respective capacities to weather intermittent socioeconomic transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Editor's Note: This is a collection of papers and edited transcription from a general session of the January 1998 Pacific Rim Allied Economic Organizations 3rd Biennial Conference, held in Bangkok, [...]

This article explores the dynamics of institutional adaptation in fast-growing, highly interconnected polities in the developing world, and challenges the thesis in modernization theory which posits that economic growth and thus higher per-capita income lead over time to democracy. One mechanism often proposed to explain this link is the idea that economic growth and higher per capita income in a society lead individual citizens in that society to become more receptive to democratic values and norms, and that this receptivity can pave the way for the birth of democracy. Yet evidence increasingly demonstrates that the link is at best tenuous and often not empirically valid. Why have many fast-growing economies and modernizing societies not made a transition to democracy, as predicted by modernization theory? This paper addresses this question, with ideas from complex adaptive systems and evolutionary social psychology, as well as case analyses of Turkey and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the publication's editorial policies on reviews of books, stating it does not review textbooks, collections of previously published research and does not accept offers to review books.

As the only Muslim majority secular country in its region with a pro-western democracy, Turkey is pivotal to western interests in the Middle East. However, Turkey's European Union accession negotiations are currently at a deadlock, and disparity between Turkey and the West is increasing on many critical issues. Despite its liberal market orientation, a more socially conservative Turkey is causing apprehension to its western partners. Turkey has started to drift eastward, while the West seeks to consolidate ties and establish common values. This paper offers an agent-based game theoretic model to assess the policy trade-offs that might align Turkey's interests more closely with those of its potential western partners and to determine where the impetus will come from to revive the enthusiasm of both Turkey and the EU for further integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that Korea will not be secure against future economic crisis without structural reform of finance, enterprise and labor markets. Real reform requires a transfer of authority from the government to market-based institutions, forcing banks to take full responsibility for the loans they authorize. Before the crisis, the government implicitly insured depositors' bank loans made to the large conglomerates, leaving banks little incentive to develop the necessary skills in credit analysis and loan monitoring. The insured agents did not take proper care to manage their risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the performance of economic policies in East Asia. Innovation of politics and government; Improvement of living standards on the rural poor and working class; Recurrence of political bargain on the economic policies.

In 1996, the government of Sri Lanka enlisted the help of international consultants to address significant weaknesses in the country's public administration. Their study focused on reorganization of public administration structures, rationalization of public sector cadres and introduction of results-based management systems and procedures. The analysis focused on five main topics: consolidation of core strategic functions in the President's office; improvement of the policy coordination process at cabinet and ministerial levels; separation of policy-making, service delivery and regulatory functions of public administration; enhancing the effectiveness of line ministries through realigning tasks; and introduction of a results-based management system that links resource inputs with well-defined outputs of departments and offices. The urgency of public service reform has been an issue on the national agenda for some time. Until the institutional capacity and effectiveness of the public administration system is upgraded, the credibility of government efforts to bring about a more liberal and competitive market environment will be seriously in doubt. The recommendations in this article can be extended beyond Sri Lanka, serving as a general model of civil service reform for other South Asian nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present a set of theoretical speculations about peasant norms that differ from those of earlier theorists: (1) Premarket peasant norms, that is, reciprocity, are a product of incentive-guided and self-interested behavior. For example, in the premarket environment, extended kinship obligations served as social insurance. (2) The evolution of markets can be beneficial for peasants. Peasants did not necessarily have to be coerced into abandoning premarket norms. Specialization led to the possibility of accumulating savings, which could substitute for the premarket institutions. (3) Peasant violence or rebellion is rarely a reaction to the emergence of markets per se, nor is it due to innate cultural predilections. Rather, peasant violence is often a response to the monopoly of control by elites over the surpluses created by markets. These claims are theoretically substantiated by simple applications of models of noncooperative games and illustrated with various sketches of examples from Western European (mainly French) economic history. The claims are contrasted with more traditional views on the impact of markets on peasant norms. The conclusive settlement of substantive issues in the study of peasant politics is not our goal; rather, we hope to clarify the arguments by directing attention to the assumptions upon which empirical results are derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's response to the commentary issued by professors John Markoff and Margaret Levi on the Tying the King's Hands: Credible Commitments and Royal Fiscal Policy During the Old Regime article. Professor Markoff has raised some very difficult and important questions concerning the use of rational choice theories to understand history. Debates over the discussions of marginal analysis among economists during 1940 raised issues similar to those raised by Markoff. At that time, economists debated whether the implications of marginal analysis conformed to experience. The discussions about the realism of marginalism as a basis form of economic decision making among twentieth-century business people focused on how accurately the assumptions of the theory mirror the conscious decision making of the actors. Markoff's commentary raises a more general question about the need for explanations to mirror the psyche of contemporaries. Levi has also raised an important question which is the origin of corporate forms. Professor Levi is right to imply that the institutions which survive are not always the most efficient ones and the kings choice of corporate solutions to solve his credit problems was not due to their implicit efficiency or superiority over all possible solutions.

Historians commonly assume that the Old Regime monarchy in France attempted to eliminate corporate society in order to create liberal institutions. They also assume that the centralization of state power occurred at the expense of such corporate bodies as provincial estates, the municipal corporations, and the village communities. By contrast, I argue that those institutions were not vestiges of an earlier society waiting to be swept away by the stronger, more unified modern state. Instead, I believe that corporate bodies not only flourished under the Old Regime, but contributed to the functioning of the absolute state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]