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This chapter presents a comparative study of politics and political institutions in Cambodia and the Philippines, which were long at the extremes within ASEAN regarding whether the members should work collectively to negotiate with China over competing South China Sea claims. Noting the similarities in informal political institutions in both states, including high levels of corruption and the dominance of family dynasties of both political economies, the chapter, nevertheless, emphasizes the differences in formal political institutions in the two countries, as well as the oligarchic political competition of elite families in the Philippines, termed “dynastic pluralism” compared to the dominance of Hun Sen’s family through intermarriage in Cambodia. While patron-clientelism is entrenched in both systems, the chapter argues, in the Philippines there are many more patrons. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Cambodia’s even more corrupt environment and less democratic institutions provide relatively wider avenues for Chinese influence over Cambodia’s government.

Since the mid-1990s in Canada, the employment and labor force participation rates of older men and women have increased steadily. In this study, we document Canadian trends alongside measures of the incentives to continue working at older ages embodied in Canada’s social security programs. The social security benefit an individual or couple receives largely depends on their career earnings. We demonstrate that Canada’s programs offering means-tested benefits play an important role in the incentives one has to continue working at older ages. While the main pension program (the Canada Pension Plan) offers higher annual benefits when labor force departure and claiming are delayed, every dollar gained by a low-income senior in annual CPP benefits results in a loss of means-tested benefits. We represent this as an implicit tax on continued work. Since the late 1980s, it appears this implicit tax has been declining.

This chapter considers the major criticisms of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The first criticism is too favorable terms for Capital Purchase Program (CPP) recipients. The Treasury designed the terms for the CPP to be favorable for the banks to increase their capital base, to rescue the financial system, not to make money. Excessively demanding terms might have undermined the banks' ability to participate in the program, thereby making it difficult to achieve the objective of stabilizing the financial sector. The second criticism is too much or too little interference in recipient operations. As most of the largest banks exited CPP within a year of its implementation, discussions about potential excessive government interference in the day-to-day management of rescued firms concentrated on a few institutions such as Citigroup and AIG, in which the government held its position for a longer period. The third criticism is lack of enforcement of the terms of support. While the vast majority of CPP recipient institutions have exited the program, those that remain illustrate this problem. Majority of the remaining CPP institutions are smaller banks that were on the FDIC's “problem bank list” as of December 31, 2014.

This chapter analyses how the global financial crisis was governed as a problem of banking solvency from October 2008. It covers the key interventions designed to bail out and recapitalize banking in the UK and US, most notably the Bank Recapitalization Fund (BRF), Capital Purchase Program (CPP), and bank debt guarantees. It reflects upon the broader drive to recapitalize resilient banks under the revised Basel III standard, and shows how the crisis was rendered as a problem of solvency through the relational arrangement of the metrics, measures, and materialities of the balance sheet with a crisis discourse on the economics of banking. It also explains how the solution of recapitalization—and not nationalization—was arrived at by combining fiscal techniques, strategies to restore an atmosphere of confidence in banking, and a discourse that represented banking as essential to the security of the population at large.