2025 Award Recipient | Hyeong-ki Kwon
Lecture: Openness and Coordination: National Economies of the U.S., Japan, and Germany in a Globalized World
As technological development accelerates, and international competition toughs, major corporations within national economies have been forced to reorganize themselves beyond their national boundaries in order to survive. Yet, national corporations’ globalization causes serious tensions between the interests of individual companies and the interests of national economies as a whole. Contrary to neoliberal optimism and nationalist pessimism, globalization does not lead to natural upgrade or denationalization. The effects of corporations’ globalization vary across national economies. Why do some countries succeed in improving innovation and production capabilities at home in corporations’ globalization, while others do not? I highlight the industrial commons as the decisive factor for success. The effects of corporate globalization vary across national economies, depending on the politics among the major actors of each nation-state. The problem of how to improve the domestic industrial commons mainly relies on the politics of coordination. I examine how three nations representing diverse economic systems, including the free-market U.S, the statist model of Japan, and the social coordination model of Germany, have reconstituted their national economies. In this presentation, I hold that the politics of coordination--how to resolve the free-rider problems and coordinate collective action among various actors which are free to move overseas--is different across the national economic systems. We argue that in order to build successfully the competitive national economies in response to a rapidly changing world, openness is needed first; as seen in the case of Japan, the closed structure deters flexible adaptation and makes the industrial commons outdated. However, as seen in the U.S., simple openness without coordination easily results in loss of industrial commons. Thus, we conclude that the more open and the more decentralized a national economy becomes, the more coordination it needs.