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Cornelia Storz, Bruno Amable, Steven Casper, Sebastien Lechevalier, Bringing Asia into the comparative capitalism perspective, Socio-Economic Review, Volume 11, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 217–232, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwt004
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While Western industrialized societies have almost gained a canonical status within political economy approaches (Blyth, 2003), Asian economies and their internal diversities have received less attention. This special issue of Socio-Economic Review1 aims to integrate Asia into the comparative capitalism approach in a more differentiated way, and hereby hopes to substantiate it. Asian countries are becoming the leading economies worldwide and confront Western scholars with many puzzles—such as the lack of institutional coherence in China, which has so far not hindered its growth, or the contrasting speed of institutional change in Japan and Korea despite a comparable institutions and comparable exogenous shocks to which they have been exposed. Our knowledge of how Asian economies are governed by institutional rules and political decisions, how institutional set-ups and outcomes are interlinked, and how their frameworks are based on historical foundations is weakly developed. A relatively rich literature exists for Japan and to some extent on Korea (Orrù et al., 1997; Boyer and Yamada, 2000; Dore, 2000; Streeck and Yamamura, 2001; Boyer et al., 2011), and comparative capitalism approaches have increasingly taken into account Asia and its internal variety (Amable, 2003; Storz and Schäfer, 2011; Witt, forthcoming). The guest editors of this volume started this project in order to consolidate and extend this understanding of both the institutional variety within and common patterns of economic coordination patterns across Asia.
