Abstract

BOYER, Robert. Asia, laboratorio de los capitalismos... y de las teorías económicas. Econ: teor. práct [online]. 2014, n.40, pp.11-28. ISSN 2448-7481.

The upswing of Asian countries after the Second World War became a challenge for the discipline of Economy and for the Social Sciences in general. Japan’s trajectory shows that the attempt of imitating the North American production model tripped on local specificities which triggered a hybridization process and an original form of capitalism. The very success of the “Japanese model” resulted on a major crisis, which anticipated the crisis of 1997 in Asia, as well as the North American and, afterwards, global crisis of 2008. In fact, Asian countries have developed at least four different forms of capitalism, but their geographical proximity does not imply the oneness of that forms, as it was demonstrated by the Euro crisis which started in 2010. China has a special place since the intense competition amongst a myriad of local corporations led to a form of development that had to compensate, through commercial spillover, the unbalance between the domestic demand and the production capacity. This article outlines a geopolitics inspired on regulation theory, and places China again at the center of international relations without meaning that it is destined to substitute the North American superpower, now in decay. Asia has become in the laboratory from which new forms of capitalism and original theories emerge.

Keywords : capitalism theory; diverse capitalisms; Japanese economy; Chinese economy; Asian economies; financial and economic crises; international relations; geopolitics.