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As one Asian economic crisis follows another, sending shock waves through the global market, questions about the making and conduct of industrial policy in the East take on a special urgency. Observers are sharply divided as to whether the ubiquitous attempts at cooperation among competing firms in Asia have been a key to competitiveness or a corrosive form of collusion. This timely book offers a close look at the impact of industrial policies on collective action in East Asia—in Japan and Taiwan and, more briefly, in South Korea. Systematically comparative and based on interviews and original research in the local languages, it focuses on forms of collective action such as cartels, standardization, and research and development consortia in the consumer electronics and minimill steel industries. The book combines detailed case studies with analyses of the political, bureaucratic, and industrial environments in which policy is crafted. It also considers how these environments have evolved in the past decade as long-ruling conservative parties have been challenged in all three countries.Among the book's findings is a surprising disparity between the ways in which Japan and Taiwan have handled collective action policy, despite their many historical, demographic, and economic similarities. Collective Action in East Asia also brings to light unexpected inconsistencies in the effectiveness of Japanese policy, which frequently succeeds with R&D consortia but struggles with cartels. Studying both the rapid-growth period of the 1980s and the more recent economic slowdown in East Asia, this book provides crucial information for an understanding of today's global economy

Particularistic spending has played a storied role in Japanese politics, but during the last decade of LDP rule, expenditures on roads, bridges, agricultural projects, and the like steadily lost ground to more programmatic outlays on social welfare, science and technology, and public order (but not defense or foreign aid). Prime Minister Koizumi played an important role in this shift, but the trends preceded him and continued under his much weaker successors. The end of the Cold War, increasing foreign investment, and the weakness of the domestic economy probably played mostly minor roles in the decline of particularism. The aging of Japanese society, not least in rural areas, created direct pressure for programmatic spending, while partisan upheaval, the growing share of floating voters, and reforms to the electoral and administrative systems created both an incentive and a greater capacity to redirect attention to the concerns of median voters.