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The role of Irish ministers of social affairs, employment, and finance is investigated in this chapter. Ireland is a majoritarian system, in which coalition and single-party cabinets have been alternating in power until the late 1980s. Ireland is ranked amongst the countries that allow their ministers very little policy discretion. The chapter investigates the role of the ministers of social affairs, employment, and finance in five multiparty governments, from 1982 to the early 2000s. Chapter 7 provides critical insights and supports the central thesis of the book that ministerial appointments have real policy consequences. At the same time, it investigates the role of coalition agreements, of the prime minister and the minister of finance.

This chapter describes the reaction to the failure of economic liberalism that shaped the new policies of the 1930s. Japan's new economic course was charted by Takahashi Korekiyo, now a great elder statesman, who in December 1931 returned to office as finance minister. Takahashi's pathbreaking policy of “Japanese Keynesianism” led Japan out of the Great Depression ahead of any other major country and created the financial foundations of a new kind of state-led industrial policy. Yoked to a militarist policy of expansion on the Asian continent, these economically nationalist policies also helped lead Japan “out of” the West and into a bloody contest for hegemony in East Asia.

This chapter tests the policy role of ministerial types employing three different indicators of social welfare generosity: welfare state de-commodification, unemployment generosity insurance, and sickness generosity insurance. Both hypotheses find strong empirical support in a sample of eighteen parliamentary democracies. Left ideologues and left partisans, alike, have played a central role in advancing social welfare expansion. Equivalently, right ideologues have been behind social welfare retrenchment. These effects are the strongest in multiparty and in minority cabinets. In the presence of strict fiscal rules and/or powerful finance ministers, only left partisans have a positive and independent effect on social welfare reform. Importantly, ministerial types explain policy change better than the ideological gravity of cabinets or the partisanship of the premier.

Chapter 8 investigates the role of social affairs, employment, and finance ministers in the Netherlands, starting with the purple coalition in 1994 to the end of the PvdA/CDA grand-coalition in 2009. The Netherlands is a consensus political party system where ministers respect the norm of non-intervention, which means that they are allowed to set policy within their own jurisdiction. On the other hand, parliamentary oversight in the Netherlands is expected to seriously limit ministerial policy discretion. Through the investigation of four multiparty governments with variable party composition, this chapter finds important differences among ministerial types, and provide details and insights that cannot be accounted for in the large-n empirical chapters.

Chapter 9 investigates the policy role of Greek ministers of social affairs, employment, and finance. Starting in 1981 to the year 2000, the chapter study four social democratic single-party majority cabinets. Greece was at a very different developmental level in the eighties, both in terms of democratic institutions but also in terms of its social welfare and labor market policies than the rest of Western Europe. As such, by studying Greece, this chapter tests the impact of ministerial types in polities that do not meet the political and socio-economic standards of Northern European countries. The main finding is that ministers are dominated by the prime minister and ministerial tenure is brief. As a result, more loyalists are appointed but also ideologues and partisans are not successful in adopting their policy agenda as in Ireland and the Netherlands.

This chapter offers an anthropological and sociological exploration of a single document from the Zenon archive, concerning the large estate given by Ptolemy II to his finance minister Apollonios and managed by successive local agents of Apollonios. Egyptian tenants on part of this land, faced with a sudden change in the method of estimating their rent imposed by the estate management, which went against normal Egyptian farming practice and imposed on the cultivators the risk of a crop smaller than estimated, abandoned the land and took refuge in a temple. Confronted by a managerial technique derived from Greek financial practices, they refuse to adapt.

The chapter opens in 1936 with rebel soldiers of the Japanese Army creeping through the snow to assassinate the elderly Japanese Minister of Finance, Takahashi Korekiyo. He was a remarkable self-taught Japanese, many times Minister of Finance, who learned his economic and financial skills raising funding in European markets to finance the Japanese-Russian War. He managed bank crises and saved his country from the Great Depression with an innovative range of pre-Keynesian macroeconomic policies. However his attempts to cut military spending ran into intense opposition from the Japanese military who were intent on invading Manchuria, and a group of fanatic soldiers ultimately assassinated him.

Both the enthusiasts and critics of the G20 are united in their characterization of the leaders group as an incipient institution of global governance. This chapter presents a different view. First, it probes the origins of the G20 and uses evidence from the earlier G20 finance minister's group to examine whether the G20 has broadened or narrowed agenda-setting in global governance. Second, it considers how the representativeness of the G20 might be expanded in an innovative way. Finally, it returns to the question of whether the G20 needs to be more representative, arguing that a closer investigation of its role suggests it could be more responsive but need not necessarily be more representative.

The assassination sent shockwaves through China, and soon led to the 1937 invasion by Japan. H. H. Kung was an American-educated Minister of Finance in the turbulent China of the 1930s. He was a member of the famous Soong family—both Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek were brothers-in-law, and his wife was the richest woman in China. As the Japanese invaded, the economy in China progressively worsened. With little regard for the law, Kung proved adept at raising revenue by forcing Chinese to pay taxes, by bank fraud, by manipulating the currency, always with something on the side for him and his family. As the war worsened, he extracted aid dollars from the American taxpayer. When the Communists took power Kung reinvented himself as a wealthy Wall Street banker.