Shifting Gears: Industrial Policy and Automotive Industry after the 2008 Financial Crisis

Apart from being one of the hardest hit sectors during the 2008 financial crisis, the auto sector is also a prominent sector where emerging auto markets such as China have fared relatively well compared to their competitors in North America and Europe. This paper examines various ways that nations have shifted their policy gears to revive and restructure the automotive industry by using the case studies of the USA, France, and China. New sets of policy initiatives are contingent on particular industrial and institutional contexts, but both developed and developing countries have employed wide range of “murky” protectionist measures. This makes it unlikely for the WTO member countries to take a naming and shaming approach and file a case at the WTO level, which poses challenges to the WTO rules and trade liberalization

Old Walled Politics or New Pandemic Peace? Lessons from South Korea’s Fight against Covid-19

Among the global pandemic’s effects is the way it has exposed the re-emergence of medieval-style walled politics, where countries reject international or regional co-operation and retreat into nationalist, go-it-alone approaches. At the same time, the crisis has revealed unusual opportunities to forge common approaches to battling this invisible enemy. South Korea, as a middle power that stood out as an early success story in the pandemic fight, has played an important role in countering the politics of the past

Quiet transformation from the Bottom: Emerging Transnational Coalition of Non-state Actors in East Asia Community Building

If analyses of community-building efforts in Northeast Asia are fixated on the level of the nation-state and the central government, then one fails to capture the complex, transnational integration dynamics that are now vigorously at work in the region, contends Seung-Youn Oh in this chapter. Non-state Actors—less constrained than national authorities by political tensions and historical legacies—are not only generating a new capacity for regional community-building, they are also strengthening existing forms of regional cooperation. Oh’s chapter explores how non-state actors in Northeast Asia in both individual countries and at the regional level serve as transnational constituencies and create regional networks to solve shared problems. Oh pays special attention to the networks and coalitions of non-state actors in China, Japan, and South Korea to assess the opportunities and challenges they face in overcoming the political and historical tensions in one of the least institutionalized regions in the world. Oh argues that issue-based and cross-border civil society collaboration has generated a new capacity for strengthening regional cooperation. In the face of pressing domestic developmental challenges in issue areas such as energy insecurity and environmental degradation, Oh examines how non-state actors are relevant to building a regional framework in Northeast Asia as both a normative and rational endeavor

Shifting Gears: Industrial Policy and Automotive Industry after the 2008 Financial Crisis

Apart from being one of the hardest hit sectors during the 2008 financial crisis, the auto sector is also a prominent sector where emerging auto markets such as China have fared relatively well compared to their competitors in North America and Europe. This paper examines various ways that nations have shifted their policy gears to revive and restructure the automotive industry by using the case studies of the USA, France, and China. New sets of policy initiatives are contingent on particular industrial and institutional contexts, but both developed and developing countries have employed wide range of “murky” protectionist measures. This makes it unlikely for the WTO member countries to take a naming and shaming approach and file a case at the WTO level, which poses challenges to the WTO rules and trade liberalization

Blown Away: How China Outsmarts WTO Rulings in the Wind Industry

Through a study of China’s wind turbine sector, this paper demonstrates how China liberally implements industrial policies and then removes them when the WTO disputes them. China’s convenient compliance with the WTO rulings reflects Beijing’s realpolitik navigation through the organization’s dispute-resolution process, rather than socialization to international norms

Fragmented Liberalisation in the Chinese Automotive Industry: The Political Logic behind Beijing Hyundai’s Success in the Chinese Market

This paper explains the extraordinary rise of the Beijing Hyundai Motor Company (BHMC), a joint venture between a state-owned enterprise run by the Beijing municipal government and Hyundai Motor Company. Within the span of three years, the BHMC soared to become China’s second-ranked automotive manufacturer in terms of units sold. I highlight the role of the Beijing municipal government in creating favourable market conditions for the BHMC during its initial operation phase (2002–2005). The Beijing municipal government selectively adopted protectionist measures and liberalising measures to promote its locally based company. I characterise this practice as fragmented liberalisation, a system through which sub-national governments discriminately apply WTO or central government regulations to promote their local joint venture partner. In so doing, I also challenge the existing assumption that multinational companies are the drivers of economic liberalisation, by showing Hyundai’s support for local protectionism and industrial policy at the sub-national level

Quiet transformation from the Bottom: Emerging Transnational Coalition of Non-state Actors in East Asia Community Building

If analyses of community-building efforts in Northeast Asia are fixated on the level of the nation-state and the central government, then one fails to capture the complex, transnational integration dynamics that are now vigorously at work in the region, contends Seung-Youn Oh in this chapter. Non-state Actors—less constrained than national authorities by political tensions and historical legacies—are not only generating a new capacity for regional community-building, they are also strengthening existing forms of regional cooperation. Oh’s chapter explores how non-state actors in Northeast Asia in both individual countries and at the regional level serve as transnational constituencies and create regional networks to solve shared problems. Oh pays special attention to the networks and coalitions of non-state actors in China, Japan, and South Korea to assess the opportunities and challenges they face in overcoming the political and historical tensions in one of the least institutionalized regions in the world. Oh argues that issue-based and cross-border civil society collaboration has generated a new capacity for strengthening regional cooperation. In the face of pressing domestic developmental challenges in issue areas such as energy insecurity and environmental degradation, Oh examines how non-state actors are relevant to building a regional framework in Northeast Asia as both a normative and rational endeavor

From a \u27super spreader of MERS\u27 to a \u27super stopper\u27 of COVID-19: Explaining the Evolution of South Korea\u27s Effective Crisis Management System

COVID-19 has placed global and national leadership under a serious stress test by threatening lives and livelihoods on an unprecedented scale. South Korea emerged as one of the first countries to flatten the transmission curve despite its high population density and proximity to China, without imposing the aggressive lockdowns or complete travel bans that China and many other countries adopted. This paper explores two questions. First, what kind of institutional and legal foundations explain South Korea’s strong public health response to the pandemic? Second, from a historical perspective, South Korea evaded the worst of the SARS outbreak in 2003 yet failed to replicate the success with MERS in 2015. What explains these fluctuating public health responses within a country and how did this effect South Korea’s response to COVID-19? This paper argues that South Korea’s crisis management system developed strategic agility and flexibility in its hierarchical model that allows crisis-friendly partnerships and swift collaboration among key actors to manage public policy challenges. Studying South Korea’s responses to these three outbreaks will not only contribute to our understanding of cross-national crisis management but also further our comprehension of South Korea’s evolution in public health response through analysing intra-national variations