Institutional change and diversity of capitalism in Asia: the Japanese case in comparative perspective
Lunch Lecture by Dr. Sébastien Lechevalier (Associate Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris).
Lecture by Dr. Sébastien Lechevalier (Associate Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris).
The lecture
Contrary to the dominant vision, according to which Japan is suffering from "arthritis", which may have caused the long stagnation that this country has faced from the early 1990s, we argue that Japanese capitalism has experienced a great transformation from the early 1980s. We get this result from a political economy analysis at three levels (corporate, institutional, and social compromise). Liberalization has come with increasing corporate diversity and inequalities. This trajectory is then compared with the ones of other Asian capitalisms.
The speaker
Sébastien Lechevalier is Associate Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris), President of the Fondation France Japon de l’EHESS (EHESS Paris 日仏財団 ; http://ffj.ehess.fr/), and director of the French Network of Asian Studies coordinated by CNRS (GIS-Reseau Asie). Being a specialist of the Japanese economy, he is the author of several books and articles, including The Great Transformation of Japanese Capitalism (Presses de Sciences Po, 2011; Routledge, 2014, Iwanami Shoten, forthcoming, 2015) and of “Bringing Asia into the Comparative Capitalism Perspective”, special issue of the Socio Economic Review (April 2013). He is currently leading a research programme entitled Labor and Finance in Asia: Understanding Organizational and Institutional Changes (in collaboration with T. Hoshi (Stanford), M. Sako (Oxford), H. Miyajima (Waseda) and Y. Tiberghien (UBC).
Lunch will be provided.
About IIAS Lunch Lectures
Every month, one of the IIAS researchers will present his or her work-in-progress in an informal setting to colleagues and other interested attendees. IIAS organises these lunch lectures to give the research community the opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and exchange thoughts and ideas.