The Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 was supposed to be the death knell for the developmental state. The International Monetary Fund supplied emergency funds for shattered economies but demanded ...that states liberalize financial markets and withdraw from direct involvement in the economy. Financial liberalization was meant to spell the end of strategic industry policy and the state-directed "policy lending" it involved. Yet, largely unremarked by analysts, South Korea has since seen a striking revival of financial activism. Policy lending by state-owned development banks has returned the state to the core of the financial system. Korean development banks now account for one quarter of all loans and take the lead in providing low-cost finance to local manufacturing firms in strategic industries.
Elizabeth Thurbon argues that an ideational analysis can help explain this renewed financial activism. She demonstrates the presence of a "developmental mindset" on the part of political leaders and policy elites in Korea. This mindset involves shared ways of thinking about the purpose of finance and its relationship to the productive economy. The developmental mindset has a long history in Korea but is subject to the vicissitudes of political and economic circumstances. Thurbon traces the structural, institutional, political, and ideational factors that have strengthened and at times weakened the developmental consensus, culminating in the revival of financial activism in Korea. In doing so, Thurbon offers a novel defense of the developmental state idea and a new framework for investigating the emergence and evolution of developmental states. She also canvasses the implications of the Korean experience for wider debates concerning the future of financial activism in an era of financialization, energy insecurity, and climate change.
Nominal yields on government debt in several countries have fallen very near their zero lower bound (ZLB), causing a liquidity trap and limiting the capacity to stimulate economic growth. This book ...provides a comprehensive reference to ZLB structure modeling in an applied setting.
This open access book identifies and analyses problems of text production in finance from three complementary perspectives: problem identification, problem analysis, and problem solution. By doing ...so, it explains why solving these problems in transdisciplinary collaboration benefits theory, practice, and society at large. Drawing on 25 years of ethnographic research, roughly 2100 text products, and more than 190 interviews with different stakeholders, it develops and evaluates measures to improve the communicative potential of financial texts and thereby make them accessible to professionals. The book will appeal to researchers and reflective practitioners in financial communication, organizational communication, financial analysis, investor relations, journalism, and applied linguistics.