Stephan Haggard – författare

In the mid-1990s, as many as one million North Koreans died in one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. The socialist food distribution system collapsed primarily because of a misguided push for self-reliance, but was compounded by the regime''s failure to formulate a quick response-including the blocking of desperately needed humanitarian relief. As households, enterprises, local party organs, and military units tried to cope with the economic collapse, a grassroots process of marketization took root. However, rather than embracing these changes, the North Korean regime opted for tentative economic reforms with ambiguous benefits and a self-destructive foreign policy. As a result, a chronic food shortage continues to plague North Korea today. In their carefully researched book, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland present the most comprehensive and penetrating account of the famine to date, examining not only the origins and aftermath of the crisis but also the regime''s response to outside aid and the effect of its current policies on the country''s economic future. Their study begins by considering the root causes of the famine, weighing the effects of the decline in the availability of food against its poor distribution. Then it takes a close look at the aid effort, addressing the difficulty of monitoring assistance within the country, and concludes with an analysis of current economic reforms and strategies of engagement.North Korea''s famine exemplified the depredations that can arise from tyrannical rule and the dilemmas such regimes pose for the humanitarian community, as well as the obstacles inherent in achieving economic and political reform. To reveal the state''s culpability in this tragic event is a vital project of historical recovery, one that is especially critical in light of our current engagement with the "North Korean question."

This is the first book to compare the distinctive welfare states of Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman trace the historical origins of social policy in these regions to crucial political changes in the mid-twentieth century, and show how the legacies of these early choices are influencing welfare reform following democratization and globalization. After World War II, communist regimes in Eastern Europe adopted wide-ranging socialist entitlements while conservative dictatorships in East Asia sharply limited social security but invested in education. In Latin America, where welfare systems were instituted earlier, unequal social-security systems favored formal sector workers and the middle class. Haggard and Kaufman compare the different welfare paths of the countries in these regions following democratization and the move toward more open economies. Although these transformations generated pressure to reform existing welfare systems, economic performance and welfare legacies exerted a more profound influence. The authors show how exclusionary welfare systems and economic crisis in Latin America created incentives to adopt liberal social-policy reforms, while social entitlements from the communist era limited the scope of liberal reforms in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. In East Asia, high growth and permissive fiscal conditions provided opportunities to broaden social entitlements in the new democracies. This book highlights the importance of placing the contemporary effects of democratization and globalization into a broader historical context.

The Asian crisis has sparked a thoroughgoing reappraisal of current international financial norms, the policy prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund, and the adequacy of the existing financial architecture. To draw proper policy conclusions from the crisis, it is necessary to understand exactly what happened and why from both a political and an economic perspective.In this study, renowned political scientist Stephan Haggard examines the political aspects of the crisis in the countries most affected—Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Haggard focuses on the political economy of the crisis, emphasizing the longer-run problems of moral hazard and corruption, as well as the politics of crisis management and the political fallout that ensued. He looks at the degree to which each government has rewoven the social safety net and discusses corporate and financial restructuring and greater transparency in business-government relations. Professor Haggard provides a counterpoint to the analysis by examining why Singapore, Taiwan, and the Philippines escaped financial calamity. The volume... provides an excellent overview of both the theories and facts of the crisis. Strongly recommended for academic collections, lower-division undergraduate through research.