Explore the vast range of titles available.

Building on the Hodgson–Mokyr debate in this journal (Volume 18, Issue 1, 2022), this article discusses how modern economic growth occurred in pre-Industrial Revolution Britain, with a particular focus on coalition politics and the marginalization of conservative political groups – vetoers to change. Such political marginalization was unusual before the 19th century, when monarchs had substantial political power and land-based conservative groups were their main political allies. This article finds the source of the English exceptionalism in the unique system of non-imperial personal union that Britain then had with the Dutch Republic and Hanover. Under this system, foreigner monarchs chose their local ally in Britain based on the security needs of their home states. It created a significant disadvantage to the Tories, the incumbent conservative groups, while providing a window of opportunity for the Whigs, the opposition group supported by new commercial interests, to form a coalition with the Crown. The long absence of the Tories from power resulted in the incorporation of their constituencies into the Whig-led regime, making the traditional economic interests the regime's ‘junior partners’, instead of formidable political competitors to the new commercial interests, which was the case before and elsewhere at that time.

Nineteenth-century Japan remains a void in the literature on institutions and growth. Developmental institutions evolved in Japan after the Meiji Restoration despite the absence of political participation. Authoritarian change agents usually face a trade-off between reform and stability: they have coercive power to remove underproductive institutions, but at the risk of inviting instability, as politically influential deprivileged elites may engage in counteraction to recover what they perceive as their entitlement. Many authoritarian regimes, thus, coopt elites by allowing them access to rent, but such buying-off inevitably compromises institutional improvement. How did Meiji Japan overcome this dilemma and liberate major fiscal and administrative spaces for productive players who generate wealth and increase the size of the economic pie for society? This article presents a model that it calls ‘elite redeployment’ to answer this puzzle. In lieu of elite bargains in participatory polities in Europe, the revolutionary authoritarian regime in Japan coercively deprivileged traditional elites and redeployed those with financial or human capital among them in productive institutions. By doing so, the Japanese authoritarian change agents dismantled the incumbent institutions in an irreversible manner and swiftly built new institutions such as modern administrative, educational, financial, and commercial sectors, while maintaining stability.

Can a rentier state evolve to a production state? This article attempts to answer this question by analysing how historically states evolved to production states and by comparing their experience with today's Gulf states. Although the Gulf states show some productive traits today, their mode of production largely remains 'production with rentier characteristics', that is reliant on oil-driven advantages. Their further economic diversification requires improved governance capabilities that enable their government to enhance human capital. Production states around the world acquired such governance capabilities through 'institutional upgrading', a replacement of clientelistic institutions with meritocratic ones. While clientelistic institutions tend to persist, such institutions were significantly reduced in these states through the exit of vested-interest players from major fiscal and organizational spaces. The exit appears to occur when these vested-interest players accept pain-sharing to ensure their protection in the context of the revealed vulnerability of their patron regime and when alternative productive gains are offered to them in lieu of conventional distribution. Presently neither condition is in existence in the Gulf states, which continue to be characterized by their direct and extensive distributional regimes. Without a prospect for immediate governance improvement, a realistic reform possibility lies in agency under institutional constraints.

Saudi Arabia's economic diversification to date has largely involved \"production with rentier characteristics\" - a mode of production that relies on oil-driven advantages such as energy- and capital-abundance and foreign labor. The kingdom's previous attempts to invest in human capital development in order to create labor-intensive sectors for local citizens were hampered by institutional fragmentation in the education sector and the legacy of rentierism. While the current government is integrating the school system and training programs, capacity-building remains the major challenge in building a skilled Saudi workforce.

The impact of imperialism on long-term development in the non-Western world was once a popular agenda of inquiry. After the modernization paradigm turned into despair for postcolonial economies, the notions of informal empire (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953) and dependency (Prebisch, 1950; Frank, 1967; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979) marked economists' discussions on underdevelopment in the non-Western world. The agenda, however, lost its momentum after the 1970s, when some Latin American and East Asian economies began growing and research interests and policy agendas shifted from blaming external constraints to identifying internal enablers (Haggard, 1990, 2018). The externalist scholarship became almost moribund thereafter, although its leitmotif was taken over by some Marxian scholarship such as the world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) and its structuralist and anti-globalization offshoots – also partly reincarnated in the literature on the resource curse (Auty, 1993; Karl, 1997).

The impact of imperialism on long-term development in the non-Western world was once a popular agenda of inquiry. After the modernization paradigm turned into despair for postcolonial economies, the notions of informal empire (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953) and dependency (Prebisch, 1950; Frank, 1967; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979) marked economists' discussions on underdevelopment in the non-Western world. The agenda, however, lost its momentum after the 1970s, when some Latin American and East Asian economies began growing and research interests and policy agendas shifted from blaming external constraints to identifying internal enablers (Haggard, 1990, 2018). The externalist scholarship became almost moribund thereafter, although its leitmotif was taken over by some Marxian scholarship such as the world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) and its structuralist and anti-globalization offshoots – also partly reincarnated in the literature on the resource curse (Auty, 1993; Karl, 1997).

While China's relations with Arab states have been studied by many, Taiwan's relations with them have hardly been investigated. This study takes Saudi Arabia as a case study and examines the development of Taiwanese-Saudi relations in the period between 1949 and 2013, comparing them to Chinese-Saudi relations. The Taiwanese-Saudi formal diplomatic relationship lasted for over four decades until 1990 and was longer than any other Taiwanese-Arab formal relationship. Even after Saudi Arabia's normalization with China, Taiwan has maintained substantial economic, social, and cultural relations with Saudi Arabia on an informal basis, which have shown signs of reinvigoration in recent years. This long Taiwanese-Saudi \"honeymoon\" was previously seen from the Cold War perspective. Nevertheless, the anti-Communism factor alone is not sufficient for explaining the course of the development of Taiwanese/Chinese-Saudi relations. This article adds three factors to the analysis — (1) Islam; (2) energy; and (3) development — and revisits those two bilateral relations.

p>This thesis investigates the political economy of Saudi–East Asian industrial relations in the past six decades, between 1953 and 2013. The analysis focuses on industrial diversification in Saudi Arabia and how this has affected Saudi Arabia's relations with East Asian states. Accordingly, Saudi–East Asian relations, which have hitherto been understood as consisting of energy producer-consumer relationships, are re-framed as \"industrialising–industrialised relationships\". This thesis identifies the main dynamics of such relationships as diffusion of industrial technology from East Asian states to Saudi Arabia, which is considered to be a microcosm of a larger collective shift in the global economy, from \"divergence\" to \"convergence\" caused by the progress in human resources development (HRD) among developing countries. In order to capture that dynamics, this thesis develops two concepts: \"techno-sovereignty\" and \"techno-diplomacy\". Techno-sovereignty assumes a developing state's pursuit of greater level of self-reliance in industrial technology through investment in HRD and avoidance of dependence on single external source of technology. On the other hand, techno-diplomacy is defined as an advanced state's diplomatic strategy of implementing the transfer of industrial technology to a developing state in order to acquire other types of gain from that state in return. Saudi Arabia's pursuit of techno-sovereignty has been implemented in two steps: first, to invite foreign direct investment (FDI) from multiple advanced states for establishing industrial production; and, second, to \"Saudise\" the production over the years through the transfer of knowledge, skills and technologies from the foreign investor to national industrial workers. Saudi–East Asian industrial relations have followed these patterns: Japan has practiced techno-diplomacy towards Saudi Arabia mainly in return for oil; and Taiwan has done so mainly in return for diplomatic recognition – since Taipei has been in competition with Beijing since 1949 regarding its international legitimacy. Those quid pro quo relations have provided Riyadh with strong bargaining chips vis-à-vis Tokyo and Taipei in demanding industrial cooperation from them in the past decades. Currently, as the focus of industrial diversification in Saudi Arabia shifts from capital-intensive heavy industries to labour-intensive manufacturing industries, the insufficiency in HRD in Saudi Arabia, deriving from the \"rentier\" nature of its society, increasingly poses obstacles to further progress of the process. Accordingly, East Asian states' contributions to the development of HRD institutions in Saudi Arabia have been coming to the fore in their bilateral industrial relations in addition to the FDI, the trend which is likely to remain important in the coming years.