Joachim Ahrens - Böcker

The countries of Central Asia are increasingly the focus of intense international attention due to their geopolitical and economic importance as well as their unsettled transition processes. The region faced enormous challenges when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and this book focuses on the reforms of the institutional environment that have been largely neglected.Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book explores key aspects of institution building as well as economic and political governance in Central Asia. Contributors from a variety of disciplines, such as economics, political economy, political science, sociology, law, and ethnology, investigate the challenges of institutional transition in a non-democratic region. The book discusses how the lack of effective institution building as well as rule enforcement in the economic and political realms represents one of the key weaknesses and drawbacks of transition, and goes on to look at how crafting market institutions will be of utmost importance in the years ahead.Making an important contribution to understanding of political-economic developments in Central Asia, this book is of interest to students and scholars of political economy, comparative economics, development studies and Central Asian studies.

Political legitimacy has become a scarce resource in Russia and other post-Soviet states. Their capacity to deliver prosperity has suffered from economic crisis, war in Ukraine and confrontation with the West. Will nationalism and repression enable political regimes to survive? This book studies the politics of legitimation in Post-Soviet Eurasia.

The countries of Central Asia are increasingly the focus of intense international attention due to their geopolitical and economic importance as well as their unsettled transition processes. The region faced enormous challenges when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and this book focuses on the reforms of the institutional environment that have been largely neglected.Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book explores key aspects of institution building as well as economic and political governance in Central Asia. Contributors from a variety of disciplines, such as economics, political economy, political science, sociology, law, and ethnology, investigate the challenges of institutional transition in a non-democratic region. The book discusses how the lack of effective institution building as well as rule enforcement in the economic and political realms represents one of the key weaknesses and drawbacks of transition, and goes on to look at how crafting market institutions will be of utmost importance in the years ahead.Making an important contribution to understanding of political-economic developments in Central Asia, this book is of interest to students and scholars of political economy, comparative economics, development studies and Central Asian studies.

The main theme of this study is the political economy of policy reform in less developed countries and post-socialist countries. Given the complexity of economic development and transition, Joachim Ahrens views failures in policy reform, poor public sector management, rent-seeking, corruption, and over-centralization as systematic, though not exclusive, instances of institutional failure. This interdisciplinary study looks for ways of constructing effective market-enhancing governance structures that provide appropriate incentive systems to cope with such failures. No blueprint is offered, but the book provides a conceptual governance framework that can be applied in a comparative way to analyze economic, political, and social obstacles to policy and institutional reform. The concept is not only used to analyze the politico-institutional foundation of policy reform in East Asia and Eastern Europe, but it also allows to elaborate country specific strategies to craft institutional safeguards that help overcome impediments to development and transition.This innovative book, which overcomes the conventional perspective of a government-market dichotomy, will be of interest to researchers, students, policymakers and all those concerned with the impact of the dialectic interaction between political and economic forces on economic development.

This book explores the interdependences of economic globalization, political tensions, and national policymaking whilst analysing opportunities for governance reform at both national and international levels. It considers how governance mechanisms can be fashioned in order to both exploit the opportunities of globalization and cope with the numerous potential conflicts and risks. The authors adopt a multidisciplinary approach based on various theories from economics, political science, sociology and law to provide new insights into globalization processes, their causes and effects and to further develop the understanding of, and interaction between globalization and governance. They underline the need to design innovative governance structures at national, regional, and global levels – an unalterable precondition to overcome political, cultural, and distributional conflicts in a globalizing world. In conclusion, the book prescribes development strategies to successfully manage and overcome the political, cultural and distributional conflicts arising in a globalizing world.Highlighting the successes and failures of globalization, this challenging book will be warmly welcomed by scholars and researchers in various fields of economics including development economics, institutional economics, political economy, and the economics of transition. Those with an interest in regulation and governance, including policymakers and professionals in non-governmental organizations and development agencies will also find the book to be an invaluable tool.

The book takes issue with the changing role of government in devising and applying science, technology and innovation (STI) policies in a late-comer economy. South Korea is presented as a point in case, due to its astonishing ascent from a developing nation in the 1960s, to an emerging market in the 1980s and a high-technology powerhouse of our days. Which incentives have kept the government focused on productivity-enhancing STI policies? And why should Korea’s national innovation system be reconfigured to fully prepare for the technological challenges of the 21st century? An institutional economics perspective complemented by expert interviews shows that organizations and institutions concerned with STI policy-making in Korea have co-evolved simultaneously mainly driven by the timing of presidential election cycles. The book contains a summary in Korean.

This book investigates the institutional underpinnings of the relatively strong economic performance in Central Asian countries since their independence. The New Institutional Economics as well as Political Economy approaches provide the conceptual framework for case studies. All contributions consider factor markets and institutions as fundamental drivers of economic growth. This volume scrutinizes the evolution, design, and performance of factor markets in the region including land and natural resources, labor, physical and human capital.

This book addresses the relevance of institutional arrangements in East Asian developmental states for the Central Asian countries. It is argued that the Central Asian transition countries share crucial similarities with the economies of East Asia. By a detailed analysis of historical developments in Northeast and Southeast Asia, a coherent and comprehensive model of the developmental state on the basis of the New Institutional Economics is developed in this book. This model is applied to Central Asia by a comparative study on the basis of semi-structured interviews that were carried out in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Both Central Asian countries show notable similarities but also crucial differences to the East Asian developmental states.

State intervention in economic activities to drive development requires specificinstitutional prerequisites that maintain strategic collaboration between thestate and businesses. Arguing that the design of institutions of state businessrelations is critical for successful state intervention in economic activities, thisbook seeks to understand the nature of the institutions of the state-agribusinessrelations in Georgia and its functional compatibilities to the institutionsof strategic SBRs. It analyses the nature of SBRs in Georgia through the lensof the New Institutional Economics (NIE). It employs a qualitative researchstrategy for the systematic collection, organization, and interpretation of thedata. Data from 39 interviews, documents on relevant regulations and laws,and the reports from the international organizations are triangulated to addressthe research question.

What is the economic order of state capitalism? Furthermore,how can its significant performance differences be explained? The firstquestion is tackled with the help of New Institutional Economics by developinga model of state capitalism. This topic is furthermore dealt with in Chapter 3 wherea taxonomy of state capitalism is presented. This chapter already explains someof the performance differences. In the last chapter with the help ofsemi-structured interviews and literature surveys – in four case studies –propositions are forwarded as to why state capitalist orders vary so widely intheir performances. Two points stick out: the quality of the bureaucracy aswell as a varying degree of commitment of the political leadership to adevelopmental course.