Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record. Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected. Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.

"This book examines the emergence of social crises in East Asia and inadequate government responses to them. Combining macro-level analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, it describes nations that have failed to protect society's most vulnerable groups in the face of rising socioeconomic risks"--

This is the most extensive study of Chin dynasty history in any language. It demonstrates the importance of cultural developments in North China under the Chin (1115-1234).

Masina reassesses the last thirty years of economic development in East Asia in light of recent dramatic events, challenging scholars and policy makers to critically review development strategies.

The book examines the political and economic developments in East Asia since the end of the Cold War in an attempt to identify a broad pattern of transition, particularly in terms of the reshaping of the state's relations with forces and institutions in economy, politics and domestic- international interactions. The chapters are organised into three parts: I: The state in the new economy; II: The state in the new politics; III: The state in the new global environment. The contributors find a general pattern of the state's withdrawal from these three areas. But it is not simply that the market takes over, as some envisaged. Instead, the transition is moving towards a set of governance-producing arrangements in which the role of both the market and the state are appreciated. The book concludes that a more sophisticated approach is needed to the problems of development vs. governance, the state vs. the market, and global dynamics vs. national interests, for a better understanding of the dynamic transition and the consequent new political economy in East Asia.

This final volume in Manuel Castells' trilogy, with a substantial new preface, is devoted to processes of global social change induced by the transition from the old industrial society to the emerging global network society. Explains why China, rather than Japan, is the economic and political actor that is revolutionizing the global system Reflects on the contradictions of European unification, proposing the concept of the network state Substantial new preface assesses the validity of the theoretical construction presented in the conclusion of the trilogy, proposing some conceptual modifications in light of the observed experience