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K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides not only a history of South Korean popular music—the premodern background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American impact, and recent globalization—but also a description of K-pop as a system of economic innovation and cultural production. In doing so, he delves into the broader background of South Korea in this wonderfully informed history and analysis of a pop culture phenomenon sweeping the globe.

The past several decades have witnessed a rebirth of global labor mobility. Workers are moving between countries at rates not seen since before World War I. During the same period, economists' study of international migration has been framed by a particular textbook model of location choice. This paper reviews the evidence on the economic causes and effects of global migration during the past half century. That evidence falsifies most of the core predictions of the old model. The economics of migration will regain vitality and relevance by discarding and replacing its outworn paradigm.

The decade from 1985 to 1995 will go down in history as an unprecedented period in which global trade barriers were reduced. Some trade agreements (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Single Market, the Uruguay Round) were prominent late in this period, but the reform wave was led by developing countries in Latin America and Asia and formerly communist countries in Eastern Europe undertaking unilateral reforms. What accounts for this remarkable shift in policy? This paper highlights the declining use of trade restrictions for balance of payments purposes and the rise in exchange rate flexibility as important factors driving the policy change.

The recent economic history of global integration has been characterized by a dismantling of capital controls and increased foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper explores the role of impediments to international capital mobility, foreign direct investment, and technology diffusion in shaping Latin American economic growth. First, the paper summarizes and quantifies the effects of the Bretton Woods international financial system in Latin America. Then, I study the consequences of capital controls—and their dismantling—on FDI and trade-induced technological advancements and their role in shaping local development, especially in the 1990s after the implementation of several trade liberalization policies.

This book examines the period leading up to the Hong Kong handover in 1997 - the 'countdown of time', and by using iconic cultural symbols such as the countdown clock, the Hong Kong Museum exhibitions and cultural heritage sites, argues that China has undergone a transition to neoliberal state, in part through its reunification with Hong Kong. The problem of synchronization with the world, a Chinese phrase that epitomizes China's engagement with modern capitalism since the first Opium War, was characterized throughout the 20th century as a 'humiliation', 'weakness', 'tragedy' and 'disaster', with China in the role of the victim of capitalist globalization. During the reunification with Hong Kong, these conventional expressions were replaced by new ones such as 'de-humiliation', 'return', 'self-esteem' and 'revival'. Hai Ren gives an ethnographic and historical analysis of this cultural and political transformation of China's globalization experience by looking closely at public history practices in mainland China and Hong Kong and how the reconfiguration of everyday life and cultural norms led to the development of this neoliberal China. As a book which straddles Chinese and Hong Kong, history, politics, cultural heritage and museum studies more generally, it can be regarded as a work of cultural political economy which will appeal to students and scholars of all of the above. Hai Ren is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Arizona, USA. Introduction: The Role of Reunification with Hong Kong in the Neoliberalization of the Chinese State 1. The Hong Kong Question: From Sovereignty to Government 2. The Affective Economy of the Hong Kong Countdown: Media Convergence, Public Feelings, and Neoliberal Subjectivity 3. History as a Governmental Discourse 4. Morality and Pleasure in the Synchronization with the World 5. The Super Firm in Spatial Representations of Socialism and Capitalism 6. Memories of the Future in Hong Kong Conclusion: Is China Truly Neoliberal, or a State with Neoliberal Characteristics?

About a decade ago, the neural network of the international financial system underwent an identity crisis. Since its establishment in 1973, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) had become the world's dominant system for transmitting information about financial transactions, handling up to 20 million messages per day across 212 jurisdictions. The Belgium-based company reached this position by providing customers with a reliable, confidential, and global system to exchange information. “[W]e have always maintained the position that we are like the internet,” Swift chief executive officer Gottfried Leibbrandt said in an October 2012 interview, “we connect everybody and we do not listen in on the conversation.” In other words, to borrow a phrase from its website, “Swift is neutral.”

Since 1980, China and India have achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and poverty reduction. The emergence of China and India as major forces in the global economy has been one of the most significant economic developments of the past quarter century. This paper examines sources of economic growth in the two countries, comparing and contrasting their experiences over the past 25 years. In this paper, we investigate patterns of economic growth for China and India by constructing growth accounts that uncover the supply-side sources of output change for each economy. Some of the results confirm themes that have emerged from the prior literature on the economic development of the two countries, however, some new findings emerge as well. In addition to decompositions of aggregate growth, we construct separate accounts for the three major economic sectors: agriculture; industry; and services. This level of detail enables us to highlight key differences in the development paths taken by China and India. In conclusion, we assess the prospects for future growth in each country.

The purpose of this study is to explore and explain the relationship between networking, external financing by banks and equity investors, and export effort in medium sized enterprises. Our research model was empirically tested on a sample of 143 MSEs in the manufacturing sector and our PLS results do not confirm the existence of a direct association between networking and export effort by MSEs. They show, however, that networking indirectly enhances MSEs’ export effort through facilitating their access to equity financing and reducing managerial risks. Whilst networking are not found to be associated with a higher access to bank financing by MSEs, this type of external financing seems to have a greater impact on export effort than equity financing. This research it is one of the first studies to explore the role of networking with stakeholders in facilitating MSEs’ access to external financing and to international markets and to merge these variables in a single model which consider simultaneously the MSE access to bank financing and to equity financing.

This study examines cross border movement and language barriers in West Africa. The Economic Community of West African States Protocols on Free Movement of Persons, Rights of Residence and Establishment established in 1979 made the movement of persons possible with little or no impediments within the West African Sub-region, with the vision of a fully integrated sub-region in years to come. In spite of the high rate of migration which characterizes the sub-region, language barriers which impede the cross border movements of persons have not been given much attention in West African migration studies. The study therefore seeks to examine language barriers in West Africa and how they manifest in the movement of persons within the sub-region. The study adopts a descriptive approach, examining the manifestations of language barriers in the intra-regional migration dynamics of West Africa. The study finds that the existence of a linguistic gap is a fact in West Africa, however, the development of multilinguism and cross-border languages have been instrumental to abating the language barriers in the Sub-region.

Globalization is shaped by the encounter of different cultures. The unique interactions of global and local results in the process of globalization. Culinary programs on TV channels emerge as a result of and take their inspiration from the cultural hybridization that takes place within the context of globalization. Culinary programs on TV is as old as the television itself. Because nutrition is a basic need for human life food programs also serves as an instrument of popular culture and entertainment. Parallel to the rise of interest in culinary programs in the 1990s and especially 2000s the interest in visual cultural artifacts also increased. Popular culinary programs in certain countries affected change in the content of such programs in others. This change in content happened by cultural interactions and hybridization. International TV channels such as Food Network, 24 Kitchen, local TV channels such as Planet Mutfak, culinary programs of celebrity chefs such as Rachael Jay, and Jamie Oliver, and TV programs of Turkish chefs such as Refika Birgül and Arda Türkmen can be shown as an instance of cultural hybridization. Other instances of such cultural hybridization culinary TV programs include the Turkish version of Come Dine With Me, Yemekteyiz and again the Turkish version of phenomenal Master Chef, Master Chef Türkiye.