Author: Klaus Schwab Publisher: Crown Currency ISBN: 1524758876 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wearable sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individuals. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frameworks that advance progress.
Author: Chalmers Johnson Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 080476560X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 818
Book Description
The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter. The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century--energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth--involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.
Author: Kenneth Pyle Publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 0786732024 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 536
Book Description
Japan is on the verge of a sea change. After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the 21st century, critical questions arise about its motivations. What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns that will help explain how Japan will respond to the emerging environment of world politics? American understanding of Japanese character and purpose has been tenuous at best. We have repeatedly underestimated Japan in the realm of foreign policy. Now as Japan shows signs of vitality and international engagement, it is more important than ever that we understand the forces that drive Japan. In Japan Rising, renowned expert Kenneth Pyle identities the common threads that bind the divergent strategies of modern Japan, providing essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Japan arrived at this moment -- and what to expect in the future.
Author: RIETI Publisher: Springer ISBN: 9789811519895 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
This open access book provides an in-depth examination of Japan's policy responses to the economic challenges of the 1980s and '90s. While MITI's earlier role in promoting rapid growth has been addressed in other studies, this volume, based on official records and exhaustive interviews, is the first to examine the aftermath of rapid growth and the evolution of MITI's interpretation of the economy's changing needs. Covering such topics as the oil shocks, trade conflict with the United States, and the rise and collapse of the so-called bubble economy, it presents a detailed analysis and evaluation of how these challenges were interpreted by government officials, the kinds of policies that were enacted, the extent to which policy aims were realized, and lessons for the longer term. This book is recommended especially to officials of countries concerned about the challenges that follow on high economic growth and to readers interested in Japan’s contemporary economic history.
Author: Peter J. Katzenstein Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501731114 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
Have Japan's relative economic decline and China's rapid ascent altered the dynamics of Asian regionalism? Peter Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi, the editors of Network Power, one of the most comprehensive volumes on East Asian regionalism in the 1990s, present here an impressive new collection that brings the reader up to date. This book argues that East Asia's regional dynamics are no longer the result of a simple extension of any one national model. While Japanese institutional structures and political practices remain critically important, the new East Asia now under construction is more than, and different from, the sum of its various national parts. At the outset of a new century, the interplay of Japanese factors with Chinese, American, and other national influences is producing a distinctively new East Asian region.
Author: Takashi Shiraishi Publisher: Springer ISBN: 9811326347 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 183
Book Description
This open access book asks why and how some of the developing countries have “emerged” under a set of similar global conditions, what led individual countries to choose the particular paths that led to their “emergence,” and what challenges confront them. If we are to understand the nature of major risks and uncertainties in the world, we must look squarely at the political and economic dynamics of emerging states, such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, and ASEAN countries. Their rapid economic development has changed the distribution of wealth and power in the world. Yet many of them have middle income status. To global governance issues, they tend to adopt approaches that differ from those of advanced industrialized democracies. At home, rapid economic growth and social changes put pressure on their institutions to change. This volume traces the historical trajectories of two major emerging states, China and India, and two city states, Hong Kong and Singapore. It also analyzes cross-country data to find the general patterns of economic development and sociopolitical change in relation to globalization and to the middle income trap.
Author: Alice Hoffenberg Amsden Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780195076035 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
South Korea has been quietly growing into a major economic force, even challenging Japan in some industries. This growth may be seen as an example of "late industrialization" and this book discusses this point.
Author: Victor Seow Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226826554 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 413
Book Description
A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine. The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.
Author: Richard McGregor Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0399562672 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
China, red or green -- Countering Japan -- Five ragged islands -- The golden years -- Japan says no -- Asian values -- Apologies and their discontents -- Yasukuni respects -- History's cauldron -- The Ampo mafia -- The rise and retreat of great powers -- China lays down the law -- Nationalization -- Creation myths -- Freezing point -- Afterword
Author: Yukiko Koga Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022641213X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
In Inheritance of Loss, anthropologist Yukiko Koga tackles complex questions of how two nations previously at war come to terms with their troubled past. Her site is Northeast China, where Japan s imperial ambitions were pursued to devastating and murderous ends in the twentieth century. There the landscape, which is still peppered with missiles and unexploded chemical weapons from the war, is the backdrop for refurbished imperial architecture and revived Japanese businesses. But the national wounds of China and Japan s history problem cannot be stitched together solely through international trade. The author shows why mutual recognition of wartime atrocities is the only thing that can allay the persistent and sporadically explosive tensions between two of the most powerful countries in the Eastern hemisphere. A milestone in memory studies that incorporates sorely needed attention to materiality and political economy, Inheritance of Loss shows just how crucial imperial legacies will continue to be despite China s and Japan s attempts to leave the past behind in pursuit of a more prosperous future."
Author: Klaus Schwab
Author: Chalmers Johnson
Author: Kenneth Pyle
Author: RIETI
Author: Peter J. Katzenstein
Author: Takashi Shiraishi
Author: Alice Hoffenberg Amsden
Author: Victor Seow
Author: Richard McGregor
Author: Yukiko Koga