This paper adopts a unified approach to an understanding of the development processes of the East Asian economies, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean, in terms of common five phases starting with Malthusian equilibria and extended to forthcoming post-demographic transitions characterized by the shrinkage of the working-age group share in the population. Notwithstanding of the basic commonality, however, there are also marked differences among the East Asian economies in the timing of turning points, durations, and substantive forms of the phases. The paper claims that those differences need to be co-explained by accompanying variations in institutional trajectories. It identifies the Malthusian origins of contrasting political-economic and social-norm characteristics in Chinese and Japanese institutional arrangements and discusses their transformations over successive phases. By delineating institutional characteristics of China and Japan from a game-theoretic perspective, it implicitly challenges prevailing views that contrast the East and the West in such general terms as kinship vs. the third party enforcement of contracts, Confucianism vs. Protestantism, collectivism vs. individualism, authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy, and the like. These dichotomies are too simplistic for explaining the uniqueness, commonality and variations of institutional arrangements in East Asia and their impacts on development processes of respective economies.

Cloud computing is rapidly emerging as the new information technology platform. It is, however, much more than simply a new set of technologies and business models. Cloud computing is transforming how consumers, companies, and governments store information, how they process that information, and how they utilize computing power. It can be an engine of innovation, a platform for entrepreneurship, and driver of corporate efficiency. While an increasingly commonly term, confusion remains over what exactly constitutes cloud computing, how the markets are unfolding, and what forces will drive their evolution and diffusion. This paper provides an overview and conceptual tools for business leaders, policymakers, and non-specialist scholars to identify, distill, and easily understand the core aspects of how cloud computing service markets are developing, and how an array of policy issues will influence how this new computing platform unfolds across the world.

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, Gene Park 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.

Although other governments have operated systems of policy finance, none have approached the Japanese system in size or been structured to deliberately relieve pressure on the budget so that it could remain balanced and low-tax. Park lays out a compelling puzzle leading us to ask why and how the Japanese created this system, why and how it was allowed to grow to such immense size, and then why it has begun to be reformed and wound down.

-Leonard Schoppa, University of Virginia

[P]rovides a compelling rationale for FILP's importance in Japan's postwar political economy. . . . [N]o one has brought to bear the sustained focus, historical scope, or analytical rigor that Gene Park has with this book.

-William W. Grimes, Boston University

Park's 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.

Gene Park is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Baruch College. He has also been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance's Policy Research Institute. He was also the receipient of a Fulbright IIE fellowship. He has a PhD in political science for the University of California, Berkeley.

The 2008–2009 financial crisis demands we look anew at the role of corporations, and the working of financial markets around the world. In this challenging and insightful book, one of our most eminent economists provides a compelling new analysis of the corporate firm; the role of shareholders, managers and workers; and institutional governance structures.

In recent decades the firm has predominantly been seen as an organization run and governed in the interests of shareholders, where management acts as the agent of shareholders, and the workers simply as instruments for share-value maximization. This book reverses this viewpoint. It sees corporations as associational cognitive systems where "cognitive actions" are distributed amongst managers and workers, with shareholders supplying "cognitive tools" and monitoring their use in the systems. Aoki analyses the different relationships that can exist between shareholders, managers, and workers from this perspective, and identifies a range of different models of organizational architecture and associated governance structures. He also discusses ways in which corporations act as players in social, political, and organizational games, as well as global economic games; how these inter-related social dynamics may change particular, distinctive national structures into the diversity incorporated in the global corporate landscape; and how they now call for new roles for financial markets.

"Masahiko Aoki uses the social mathematics of game theory to reveal the deep structure of corporate governance systems, in the process explaining the persistence of diversity under conditions of globalization. His profound and highly original analysis speaks directly to the issue of corporate governance reform in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9."
-Simon Deakin, Professor of Law, University of Cambridge
"The recent wave of fraud, corruption, and fiscal irresponsibility at the highest corporate levels dramatizes the need for a model of the modern corporation that is at the same time deeply economic in the recognition of the centrality of incentives, and deeply sociological in the recognition of the centrality of social norms and a culture of corporate morality. Professor Aoki has combined his magisterial knowledge of business organization with a foundational study of the role of culture in epistemic game theory to produce, for the first time, a truly transdisciplinary model of the corporation."
-Herbert Gintis, Santa Fe Institute
"This is a path breaking book that provides a rigorous analysis of the cognitive underpinnings of corporations. It gives fundamental insights into the diversity of organizational forms that exist and the association of these with the historical, political, social, and technological contexts within which they operate. As with so much of Professor Aoki's work, it will radically alter the way in which we view the corporation."
-Colin Mayer, Peter Moores, Dean, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
"A pioneering contribution which formalizes in game theoretic language complex institutional structure and environment of the corporation both at a moment of time and over time."
-Douglass C. North, Nobel Laureate in Economics 1993, Spencer; T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis