Exploring 21st Century Capitalisms and Asia: The Impact of Financialization

The study of institutions is increasingly dominated by discussions of change; how and why forms of capitalism are changing, particularly in the light of the impact of globalization, neo-liberalism and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis e.g. (Schmidt and Thatcher, 2013; Morgan and Whitley, 2012; Thelen, 2014; Streeck, 2014a) and specifically on East Asia (Walter and Zhang, 2012: Whitley and Zhang (2016)). Mostly these discussions focus on particular national contexts and the impact on them of both internal and external changes. Rarely do they focus on the interdependencies between national capitalisms and even more rarely do these accounts examine interdependencies across regional contexts, e.g. between forms of western capitalism and forms of Asian capitalism. In this paper, I take the view that in order to understand these changes, it is necessary to undertake just such analysis and see how Western and Asian forms of capitalism are interacting in the current period.