Blockchain Papers

Tracy Dathe

No abstract is available for this record.

Daniel Santos Kosinski, Valter Duarte Ferreira Filho

O bitcoin foi lançado em 2009 com a pretensão de ser moeda privada, não institucional e livre dos arbítrios governamentais. Não teve êxito como tal, mas mostrou-se um meio para transferir direitos fora da vigilância e do controle das autoridades nacionais e internacionais. Por isso, o governo da China, extremamente cioso da sua soberania monetária, o considerou uma ameaça à segurança financeira, reprimindo o seu uso. Apesar disso, identificou nas tecnologias do bitcoin uma oportunidade para criar uma moeda digital governamental. O resultado foi a instituição do “renmimbi digital”, com o qual pretende maior rapidez e eficácia na execução das políticas internas, controlar essa nova modalidade de transações comerciais e, se possível, erguer as bases de uma nova ordem financeira centrada na China.

Rafael Ramos da Luz

Despite the predominance of liberal ideology in the United States since its formation as an independent nation, the US has consistently expanded its capacity to finance and support the efforts of the private sector to create and commercialize new technologies in strategic sectors. As such, this study aims to identify and describe the characteristics of interventions by the American state to foster economic development. It also seeks to analyze how these characteristics fit within the different typologies of the Developmental State. A case study was conducted on the nanotechnology sector in the US, complemented by mini case studies on the computation, semiconductor, and biotechnology sectors. The empirical findings were compared to the ideal types of the Regulatory State, the Developmental Bureaucratic State, and the Developmental Network State. These ideal types were constructed using the Weberian model using concepts from the literature pertaining to the Developmental State. This study concludes that the American Developmental State has adopted a model that is closely related to the Developmental Network State, acting in a fragmented and decentralized manner, dedicated to promoting collaboration and joint action with the private sector. This is in line with the triple helix model (industry, academia, and government) with the intention of fostering development and growth of high-technology sectors, which are considered economically, scientifically, or militarily strategic. Furthermore, the State also carries out various actions designed to facilitate transforming technological innovations into commercialized products, with the idea of ensuring the country's scientific and technological leadership, its international competitiveness, the vitality of its domestic industry, and the dynamism of the national economy.

Ho‐fung Hung

This paper assesses the sources of potential instability of China's political economy by expositing the limits of the post-Mao regime of capital accumulation in historical and comparative perspectives. It argues that the new spatial and socio-political orders under this regime, while propelling China's economic miracle, also contribute to the internalization of the global overaccumulation crisis, which has been haunting the world capitalist system since the late 1960s, into China's national economy. Whereas decentralization of regulatory authority of the state accelerates overinvestment among local economic agents, breakdown of the Maoist social compact and the subsequent class polarization foster underconsumption. The resulting structural imbalance of the economy leads to the risk of falling profit across key sectors and China's over-reliance on the export market, the expansion of which has hinged much on the debt-financed and unsustainable consumption spree in the US. A full-fledged overaccumulation crisis within China in the form of extensive bankruptcy of enterprise, surging unemployment and financial turmoil will certainly trigger extensive global repercussions, given China's weight in the global economy. This crisis, nonetheless, is not inevitable, and can plausibly be averted through a recentralization of the state's economic regulatory functions and income redistribution. No matter whether and how such a crisis unfolds, nonetheless, it is not likely to stop the shift of the center of gravity of global capitalism to Asia in the long run.

Charles Hankla

What political factors influence the allocation of economic patronage in democracies? Answering this question is vital to improving our knowledge of how states and markets interact. In this paper, I argue that changing levels of party centralization can drive important changes in the allocation of state largess. When governing parties are centralized, national party leaders will control sources of patronage, targeting benefits to particularly influential regions and industries. By contrast, when governing parties are decentralized, influential sub-national party leaders will advocate for their constituents, allocating patronage evenly through a national logroll. I find evidence for these relationships by comparing India's distribution process for industrial licenses and government finance under a decentralized Congress Party (1954-61) to its distribution process under a centralized Congress Party (1969-75).

Uk Heo, Alexander C. Tan

South Korea and Taiwan have similar experiences as to political and economic development, i.e., rapid economic growth and democratization. However, the 1997 financial crisis experiences were quite different South Korea was hit hard by the crisis whereas Taiwan was barely touched. Why were the experiences different between South Korea and Taiwan? We argue that economic fundamentals were differential leading up to the crisis. More importantly, the differences in the pace of financial liberalization and the method that South Korea financed its growth particularly in the 1990s were much different than Taiwan's. We also argue that the differential impact of the crisis on the two countries can be attributed to the institutions of their respective political economy, decentralized vs. concentrated industrial structure, and interest group structure that helped in the creation of an autonomous state. Given the dominance of SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) and the state's control of critical resources along with dispersed and weak interest group structures, economic technocrats in Taiwan were able to employ tough pre and post‐crisis policies to maintain Taiwan's economic viability, whereas South Korea was not able to.