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The Bismarckian welfare state in France is financed by social security contributions to an even greater degree than is true in Germany. During the oil‐price crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, job losses could be contained through an expansion of nationalized industries and subsidies to private firms. This changed with the end of dirigisme in industry after 1983. Thereafter, early retirement was expanded to absorb the massive job losses caused by industrial restructuring. Since rising non‐wage labour costs impeded job creation in the private services, the government has shifted part of the burden to a special income tax, whereas attempts by successive governments to reduce the generosity of welfare benefits were typically blocked by large‐scale public protests.

This chapter investigates industrial restructuring in the slow‐growing food industry in the USA, asking why an industry with a growth factor of less than 1% flourishes in a world in which companies strive for growth rates of 10% or more. It first looks at the industrial composition (sectoral distribution) of the Fortune 500 [the largest 500 companies in the US as listed by Fortune Magazine, on the basis of publicly available data], and at the industrial restructuring that occurred in the 1980s in the US economy, showing a breakdown of consumer products into cyclical and noncyclical groups. The food industry is in the noncyclical group, which increased its share of revenues while decreasing its share of companies in the Fortune 500. Other sections of the chapter look at the following: consolidation through mergers and acquisitions; financial innovations – the ability to use public markets for leveraged financing and a possibly more heavy reliance (of noncyclical companies) on high‐yield bond financing (for which evidence is presented); the financing of biotechnology for food production and the associated structural change in production; the impact of the combination of high‐yield financing and high tech in the food industry; and foreign and international influences.

Chapter 8 examines the consequences of industrial restructuring, which began in the early 1990s and continues to the present day. The great majority of state-run and collective enterprises have been privatized, and all firms—including those in which the state has retained a stake—have been turned into shareholding companies. Tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, and permanent job tenure has been replaced by much more precarious employment relations. As work unit communities have been transformed into profit-oriented enterprises, workers have been reduced to hired labor, losing their status as legitimate stakeholders and eroding the foundations for workplace participation. Shop-floor self-management has been replaced by harsh disciplinary regimes enforced by bonuses, fines, and the threat of dismissal, and staff and workers congresses have been sidelined. Workers, whose influence is now explicitly seen as compromising efforts to maximize profits, have been disenfranchised.

An account and analysis is given of the largely unanticipated decline of the US high‐yield market in 1989 and 1990, and its subsequent rallying in 1991 and 1992. Structural and cyclical factors affecting the high‐yield market are discussed by looking at the economic factors that influence changes in its supply and demand, and returns: aspects addressed are the default rate on high‐yield debt, higher spreads, credit conditions, stock prices, and repayment. A test developed by Brown, Durbin and Evans (1975) is used to analyze the level and month‐to‐month changes in returns and the number of high‐yield issues from 1985 to 1991, and this shows that structural stability was not part of the landscape. In other words, the functional economic relationships between cyclical factors, credit/quality defaults, competitive market yields (etc.) that drove the high market during the 1980s changed considerably – apparently as a result of the dramatic increases in government regulatory intervention in that market – but appear to have been restored by late 1991 as the market recovered from regulatory destabilization and responded to more economic fundamentals in the marketplace. The remainder of the chapter discusses the cause and consequences of financial distress in companies, the fact that some industries are more sensitive to economic conditions than others, company restructuring for economic recovery, and challenges and opportunities in 2001 and beyond; Appendix B gives details of the technical material used in the chapter.

This chapter covers $27.5 billion in subsidies to Chinese auto-parts from 2001-2011 that helped make one of the world’s largest producers and exporters. The auto-parts “pillar industry” received the Chinese government’s strong support, growing more than 150 percent since 2004, but is highly fragmented with more than 10,000 registered and 15,000 unregistered manufacturers. U.S. global auto strategy centered on manufacturing in China and exporting back home. Consequently, China’s auto-parts exports to the United States are three times those of its next highest trading destination, Japan. Specific subsidies included $2.3 billion reported by 73 companies (2001-2009); $1 billion to coal (2001-2010); $0.6 billion to electricity (2002-2010); $0.3 billion to natural gas (2004-2010); $1.6 billion to glass (2004-2010); $3.2 billion to cold-rolled steel (2003-2010); and $18.4 billion for technology-development and industrial-restructuring (2001-2011). For the next decade, the government has committed an additional $10.9 billion in subsidies for industrial-restructuring and technology-development.

This chapter discusses the movements for equality during another round of industrial restructuring in the steel and pottery industries. At the same time foreign competition and shifting capital threatened local jobs, historic national movements for equality, coalescing around black freedom and women's rights, played out at the local level. Locally, African Americans and women demanded greater access to factory jobs in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race and gender. In the local potteries that had survived the 1950s, the workforce changed little, but pay scales and the sex typing of jobs changed in subtle but important ways. In contrast, workers at Weirton Steel experienced a radical redrawing of gender and racial divisions even while class-action lawsuits for discrimination were still working their way through the court system.

Chapter 9 looks back over China’s history since 1949 and considers prospects for the future. Chinese workers are beginning to reorganize, this time largely outside the confines of party-controlled institutions, and their strikes and protests have won important victories. Until they are able to regain some form of workplace citizenship rights, however, their gains will be limited and precarious. The chapter closes with an overview of parallel developments around the globe. It first examines three waves of labor unrest during the twentieth century that gave rise to the participatory institutions that characterized the era of industrial citizenship, before describing the subsequent demise of these institutions.

Up until 1996, the interpretation of Thailand as something at least akin to an economic ‘miracle’ was hegemonic, and the analysis offered here has not so much attempted to challenge this interpretation on its own terms as to offer an alternative interpretation that recognizes why Thailand’s rapid industrialization process can be considered simultaneously a success in capitalist terms and a highly troubled process from other perspectives. The economic events that began in 1996, however, have considerably tarnished the mainstream image of Thailand as a ‘new little dragon’ and have called into question the notion that Thailand’s development has been an unquestionable capitalist success story. The framework I have presented for analysing Thailand’s uneven and contradictory success story can also be used to analyse the dynamics that are at work in the recent bout of economic bust, partial recovery, and post-crisis political manoeuvring. In this chapter, then, I round out the discussion of Thailand’s uneven industrial transformation and the role of the Thai state in this process by suggesting how the dialectically conceived internationalization processes discussed earlier might help to explain the nature of the contemporary economic crisis and the economic challenges that lie ahead. More specifically, I offer here an alternative to the dominant explanations of the Thai economic crisis, which have tended to focus narrowly either on corruption and lack of transparency in the functioning of Thai institutions (the dominant line of analysis emanating from the West and neo-liberals) or on international forces beyond the control of the Thai state, such as currency traders and IMF measures (a prominent line of analysis in much of Southeast Asia and among neo-Weberians). While these lines of analysis vary in where they place the blame for the Thai crisis, they share the view that the crisis is primarily financial and does not reflect deep, underlying structural problems in either the Thai pattern of industrial growth or the place of small industrial exporting countries in the global economy. The analysis I offer here differs from both types of views on a number of counts.

The economic crisis and the rise of the Thai Rak Thai Party supplies a paradoxical dénouement to a half-century of rapid Thai economic growth and industrial transformation—as well as to a much longer period of internationalization and general social change. The paradox, however, is not an unsolvable riddle but rather the contradictory character of dependent capitalist development, which inevitably brings destruction along in the train of creation, predicating new possibilities of accumulation on processes of violent devaluation. The Thai political economy now experiences this volatility in virtually full force, having been ‘opened’ and integrated into the rhythms of global capital accumulation over the course of more than a century. The seeming stability and predictable growth of the years between 1950 and 1995 were facilitated tremendously by Thailand’s integral role in the Cold War system, which created various ‘conjunctural’ cushions against the underlying volatility (e.g. US aid, favoured trade status). With the end of the Cold War system, the Thai political economy is now being increasingly thrust into the less predictable world of global neo-liberalism and post-Fordism and is thus less cushioned against capitalism’s ‘gales of creative destruction’. To say this is not to say that growth and industrialization are now on hold. The crisis may well open new opportunities for accumulation and even resumption of rapid growth. But even successful capitalist growth has always done damage to a significant portion of the population—creating and perpetuating enormous socio-spatial disparities—and it will very likely continue to do so in the future. At the same time, the vagaries of the era of ‘globalization’ may make the growth dynamic much rockier than in the past. Boosters of East Asian ‘miracles’ should be reminded that other political economies—e.g. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina—have been regarded as ‘miracles’ in the past, and while these remain important industrial producers today, they would hardly be invoked as models for improvement of livelihoods and social welfare. A legitimate concern regarding many of the Asian NICs, including Thailand, may well be whether or not the international accumulation processes in which they are integrated will lead in the directions previously traversed by so many of the former ‘miracle’ economies of Latin America.