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Throughout the twentieth century, electricity was considered to be the primary vehicle of modernity, as well as its quintessential symbol. In India, electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums were spent on the project from then until now. Yet despite all this, sixty-five years after independence, nearly 400 million Indians have no access to electricity. Electrifying India explores the political and historical puzzle of uneven development in India's vital electricity sector. In some states, nearly all citizens have access to electricity, while in others fewer than half of households have reliable electricity. To help explain this variation, this book offers a regional and historical perspective on the politics of electrification of India as it unfolded in New Delhi and three Indian states: Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. In those parts of the countryside that were successfully electrified in the decades after independence, the gains were due to neither nationalist idealism nor merely technocratic plans but rather to the rising political influence and pressure of rural constituencies. In looking at variations in how public utilities expanded over a long period of time, this book argues that the earlier period of an advancing state apparatus from the 1950s to the 1980s conditioned in important ways the manner of the state's retreat during market reforms of the 1990s.

Today, by a number of measures, the ex-socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe are among the most globalized in the world. This book argues that the origins of Central and Eastern Europe’s heavily transnationalized economies should be sought in their socialist past and the efforts of reformers in the 1970s and 1980s to expand ties between domestic industry and transnational corporations (TNCs). The book’s comparative-historical analysis examines the trajectories of six socialist and postsocialist economies, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The second part of the book focuses on the region’s deepening specialization in the 2000s as a TNC-dominated transnational manufacturing hub. It identifies three international market roles that the region’s state came to occupy in the transformation: assembly platform, intermediate producer, and combined. It explains divergence within the region through the comparative analysis of the politics of institutional adjustment after socialism.

This book provides an account of the history, politics, and policy of Japan's strategic space development. The dual-use nature of space technologies, meaning that they cut across both market and military applications, has had two important consequences for Japan. First, Japan has developed space technologies for the market in its civilian space program that have yet to be commercially competitive. Second, faced with rising geopolitical uncertainties and in the interest of their own economics, the makers of such technologies have been critical players in the shift from the market to the military in Japan's space capabilities and policy. The book shows how the sum total of market-to-military moves across space-launch vehicles, satellites and spacecraft, and emerging related technologies already mark Japan as an advanced military space power.

Asian regional institutions have proliferated in the new century. An investigation and explanation of institutional variation across regions contributes to an assessment of Asia's regional institutions. The determinants of choice for supranational regional institutions in Europe are unlikely to be replicated in Asia. (Chapter 6) The evolution of European regional institutions does suggest that balancing representation and delegation are tasks confronted by all regional institutions in different ways. (Chapter 2) In contrast to Europe, Latin America suggests that supranational institutions may play a beneficial role in expanding trade, a deeper integration agenda may prove more difficult. (Chapter 5) Although economic crises may boost institution building, their positive effect depends on the source of the shock and the response of global institutions (Chapter 7). In efforts to finesse the shortcomings of consensus decision-making in regional institutions, changes in the structure and process of delegation in existing institutions appears most promising. (Chapter 8) The demand for regional courts in Asia may grow with binding treaties that create rights and obligations for private persons. (Chapter 3) Membership rules could change to reinforce regional integration. (Chapter 4) Asian regional institutions have played a positive role in the socialization of states, even in the absence of more formal and binding institutions. (Chapter 9) If political rivalries, rather than economic integration, have driven Asian regional institutions, the prospects for widespread institutional innovation are limited. (Chapter 10) If demand for deeper economic integration grows, however, the landscape of Asian regional institutions could change more dramatically.

The era of globalization saw China emerge as the world’s manufacturing titan. However, the “made in China” model—with its reliance on cheap labor and thin profits—has begun to wane. Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese state shifted from attracting foreign investment to promoting technological competitiveness of domestic firms. This shift, however, caused tensions between winners and losers, leading local bureaucrats to compete for resources in government budget, funding, and tax breaks. While bureaucrats successfully built coalitions to motivate businesses to upgrade in some cities, in others, vested interests within the government deprived businesses of developmental resources and left them in a desperate race to the bottom. In Manipulating Globalization, Ling Chen argues that the roots of coalitional variation lie in the type of foreign firms with which local governments forged alliances. Cities that initially attracted large global firms with a significant share of exports were more likely to experience manipulation from vested interests down the road compared to those that attracted smaller foreign firms. The book develops the argument with in-depth interviews and tests it with quantitative data across hundreds of Chinese cities and thousands of firms. Chen advances a new theory of economic policies in authoritarian regimes and informs debates about the nature of Chinese capitalism. Her findings also shed light on state-led development and coalition formation in other emerging economies that comprise the new “globalized” generation.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to one of Japan's thorniest public policy issues: why are women increasingly forgoing motherhood? At the heart of the matter lies a paradox: although the overall trend among rich countries is for fertility to decrease as female labor participation increases, gender-friendly countries resist the trend. Conversely, gender-unfriendly countries have lower fertility rates than they would have if they changed their labor markets to encourage the hiring of women—and therein lies Japan's problem. The authors argue that the combination of an inhospitable labor market for women and insufficient support for childcare pushes women toward working harder to promote their careers, to the detriment of childbearing. The book provides policy recommendations for solving not just Japan's fertility issue, but those of other modern democracies facing a similar crisis.

It would be easy to cheat someone on eBay. However, an essential characteristic of the site prevents this from happening: buyer and seller reviews form what amounts to an “index of reputation.” The availability of such an index provides a strong incentive to be an honest trader. This book melds concepts from businesses like eBay with politics. The author uses interdisciplinary tools to argue that the intelligent use of widely available Internet technologies can strengthen reputational mechanisms and significantly improve public governance. Based on this notion, the book proposes a governance model that leans on the concept of reputational incentives while discussing the pivotal role of reputation in politics today. The author argues that a continuous, distributed process of assessing policy outcomes, enabled by an appropriate information system, would contribute to a governance model characterized by effectiveness, efficiency, and a minimum amount of rent-seeking activity. Moreover, if citizens were also allowed to express their views on prospective policies, then reputation-based governance would provide a platform on which to develop advanced forms of participative democracy.

Governments confront difficult political choices when they must determine how to balance their spending. But what would happen if a government found a means of spending without taxation? In this book, the author demonstrates how the Japanese government established and mobilized an enormous off-budget spending system—the Fiscal Investment Loan Program (FILP)—which drew on postal savings, public pensions, and other funds to pay for its priorities and reduce demands on the budget. The book argues that this system underwrote a distinctive postwar political bargain, one that eschewed the rise of the welfare state and Keynesianism, but that also came with long-term political and economic costs that continue to this day. By drawing attention to FILP, this study resolves key debates in Japanese politics and also makes a larger point about public finance, demonstrating that governments can finance their activities not only through taxes, but also through financial mechanisms to allocate credit and investment. Such “policy finance” is an important but often overlooked form of public finance that can change the political calculus of government fiscal choices.