New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan takes a creative and comparative view of the new challenges and dynamics confronting these maturing democracies.

Numerous works deal with political change in the two societies individually, but few adopt a comparative approach—and most focus mainly on the emergence of democracy or the politics of the democratization processes. This book, utilizing a broad, interdisciplinary approach, pays careful attention to post-democratization phenomena and the key issues that arise in maturing democracies.

“As two paradigmatic cases of democratic development, Korea and Taiwan are often seen as exemplars of both modernization and democratization. This volume both contributes and moves beyond this focus, looking forward to assess the maturation but also the risks to democracy in both countries. With its strong comparative focus and a sober appreciation of how hard it can be not to just to attain but to sustain democracy, it represents a major contribution."  

     — Benjamin Reilly, Dean, Sir Walter Murdoch School of Public Policy and International Affairs, Murdoch University

What emerges is a picture of two evolving democracies, now secure, but still imperfect and at times disappointing to their citizens—a common feature and challenge of democratic maturation. The book demonstrates that it will fall to the elected political leaders of these two countries to rise above narrow and immediate party interests to mobilize consensus and craft policies that will guide the structural adaptation and reinvigoration of the society and economy in an era that clearly presents for both countries not only steep challenges but also new opportunities.

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Larry Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He is also Director of Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Gi-Wook Shin is Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the Tong Yang, Korea Foundation, and Korea Stanford Alumni Chair of Korean Studies, and Professor of Sociology at Stanford.

This volume collects 22 articles by Masahiko Aoki, selected from writings published over the course of his 45-year academic career. These fascinating essays cover a range of issues, including mechanism design, comparative governance, corporate governance, institutions and institutional change, but are tied together by a focus on East Asia and a comparative institutional framework.

Specific topics include the early stages of mechanism design theory, comparative analysis of vertical, horizontal and modular industrial coordination and its applications, cooperative game-theoretic approaches to the diversity of corporate government structure, the endogenous nature of institutions, and comparative and historical analysis of institutions in Japan, China and Korea.

Students, professors and scholars with an interest in comparative institutional studies and East Asian studies will find this book a useful and illuminating resource.

The Tenth Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum was held at Stanford University on June 28, 2013. Established in 2006 by Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center (Shorenstein APARC), and now convening twice annually and alternating in venue between Stanford and Seoul, the forum brings together distinguished South Korean (Republic of Korea, or ROK) and U.S. West Coast–based American scholars, experts, and former military and civilian officials to discuss North Korea, the U.S.-ROK alliance, and regional dynamics in Northeast Asia. The Sejong Institute of Korea is co-organizer of the forum. Operating as a closed workshop under the Chatham House Rule of individual confidentiality, the forum allows participants to engage in candid, in-depth discussion of current issues of vital national interest to both countries. Participants constitute a standing network of experts interested in strengthening and continuously adapting the alliance to best serve the interests of both countries. Organizers and participants hope that the publication of their discussions at the semi-annual workshops will contribute to the policy debate about the alliance in both countries and throughout Northeast Asia.

The levels of violence in Mexico have dramatically increased in the last few years due to structural changes in the drug trafficking business. The increase in the number of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) fighting over the control of territory and trafficking routes has resulted in a substantial increase in the rates of homicides and other crimes. This study evaluates the economic costs of drug-related violence. We propose electricity consumption as an indicator of the level of municipal economic activity and use two different empirical strategies to test this. To estimate the marginal effects of violence, we utilize an instrumental variable regression created by Mejía and Castillo (2012) based on historical seizures of cocaine in Columbia interacted with the distance of the Mexican border towns to the United States. We find that marginal increases of violence have negative effects on labor participation and the proportion of unemployed in an area. The marginal effect of the increase in homicides is substantive for earned income and the proportion of business owners, but not for energy consumption. We also employ the methodology of synthetic controls to evaluate the effect that inter-narco wars have on local economies. These wars in general begin with a wave of executions between rival criminal organizations and are accompanied by the deterioration of order and a significant increase in extortion, kidnappings, robberies, murders, and threats affecting the general population. To evaluate the effect that these wars between different drug trafficking organizations have on economic performance, we define the beginning of a conflict as the moment when we observe an increase from historical violence rates at the municipal level beyond a certain threshold, and construct counterfactual scenarios as a weighted average from optimal control units. The analysis indicates that the drug wars in those municipalities that saw dramatic increases in violence between 2006 and 2010 significantly reduced their energy consumption in the years after the change occurred.