China’s coercion will undermine economic leadership

Significance Foreign governments and multinational business will welcome this but will view it with justified scepticism, given Beijing’s record of using economic coercion to promote its political interests. Impacts China will become more open in key sectors such as finance, oil and gas, and automobiles. Large parts of China’s economy will remain inaccessible in practice to foreign investment. Beijing will continue cautious support for increased international use of the renminbi.

Genesis, Evolution and Indicators of Leadership in the World Economy

The article reflects the results of scientific research on leadership in the world economy. The purpose of the article is to analyze the problems of determining the key factors of the genesis and evolution of this phenomenon, as well as to identify indicators of the leading position of countries in the global economy. The relevance of the topic is due to the current global processes of the structural shifts within the world economic system and trends concerning a new change in the geo-economic leadership. Based on the world-system methodology, the geo-economic approach, as well as the comparative and historical methods in economics, methods of global political economy, the author developed and demonstrated their synergic potential applied to the research of the world economy’s evolution. Heuristic possibilities of the methodological-theoretical concept of a geo-economic polarity (including multipolarity) are used. The author concludes that the leadership is characterized by the presence of immanent factors that determine the genesis of becoming a leader. It is substantiated the significance of each of these factors and proved that their effective combination leads to the formation of a leadership in the global economy. The article provides and describes the chronological periodization of leadership, and its universal triggers, which are unique for each specific stage of the world economy’s development. It is established the presence of key indicators that reflect this leadership, and emphasizes the change and expansion of the range of these indicators in the process of the evolutionary development of productive forces. It is justified that current leadership tends to geographic dispersion and is expressed in the gradual establishment of a geo-economic multipolarity of the world economy. The article predicts the current change in the nature of geo-economic leadership itself.

Confucianism and Protestantism: prospects for the East-West transcivilizational convergence

The aggravation of the struggle for global leadership between the United States and China in the context of rapidly developing globalization has brought to the fore the problem of a comparative analysis of the ethical and value foundations of socio-economic dynamics, innovativeness and competitiveness of the Euro-Atlantic (primarily Protestant) society, on the one hand, and the East Asian (primarily Confucian) society, on the other. The purpose of this study is to compare the religious and ethical systems of Confucianism and Protestantism in terms of their competitive advantages, compliance with the interests of global economic leadership, and mutual adaptability. The study applies the interdisciplinary approach, methods of synergetic, civilizational and world-system analysis. It is argued that the modernization potential and mental-value compatibility of the Protestant and Confucian worlds is much higher than that of respectively the Protestant and the post-Soviet Eurasian. The key correspondences of ethical-value principles and motivations of Protestant and Confucian cultures in their genetics, historical dynamics and modern dimension have been determined. It is shown that such fundamental principles of modern Western society as pluralism and the rule of law have their traditional correspondences, albeit in a transformed form, among the core values of Chinese and, geographically wider, Confucian social culture. Therefore, the current trend of China’s return to its cultural roots, to Confucian ethics not only does not interfere with the process of modernization and the country’s movement towards global financial and economic leadership, but, on the contrary, contributes to these processes. In this regard, the prospects for a rational convergence of East and West values, primarily Protestantism and Confucianism, within the framework of a new globalized civilization of the future look rather likely.

Neoliberalism, leadership, and democracy: Schumpeter on “Schumpeterian” theories of entrepreneurship

This article reinterprets Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship in a decidedly un-“Schumpeterian” way, and argues that continued emphasis on Schumpeter’s alleged glorification of the entrepreneur constitutes a missed opportunity for democratic critics of capitalism and neoliberalism. I demonstrate that Schumpeter did not exalt the individual entrepreneur as the paradigm for economic and political leadership in capitalist societies, and I show that he offers a surprisingly robust resource for reconceptualizing entrepreneurship. Schumpeter theorized entrepreneurship: (1) as a phenomenon that could not be exemplified by either individual persons or strictly private entities; (2) as a conceptual mechanism for analyzing change in the history of capitalism; and (3) even as evidence that political and economic leadership should not be conflated in modern democratic societies. By contextualizing Schumpeter’s discussions of the entrepreneur, I suggest that a reconsideration of Schumpeter’s actual theory of entrepreneurship would invigorate contemporary debates about the role of leadership in capitalist economies and liberal-democratic polities.

On the Beneficiaries of the Technology Advances

Рассматриваются и сопоставляются движущие силы научно-технического прогресса в СССР и России. Показано, как конкуренция за достижение военного и экономического лидерства в мире определяла необходимость создания в СССР передовых военных и гражданских технологий. Приводятся научно-технические достижения СССР по ряду ключевых отраслей и прослеживается взаимосвязь с образовательными технологиями. Отмечаются существенные отличительные особенности российского коммерческого бизнеса по сравнению с принципами социалистического производства, пагубное влияние этих особенностей на развитие научно-технического прогресса в России. The study considers and compares the research and development drivers in the USSR and modern Russia. It is shown that the competition for the global military and economic leadership shaped the need to develop advanced military and civil technologies in the USSR. The paper lists the USSR technology achievements in a number of key industries, and the educational technologies behind them. We identified significant differences between the Russian business practices and the socialist ones, and the negative impact of such differences on the research and technology advancement in Russia.

Beyond the Plantation

Betty’s Hope functioned as a civic and military space as much as an economic space in the early Codrington years. As governors, Christopher Codrington II and Christopher Codrington III doubled as war leaders, employing their prior service and experience and funneling it into military construction. This chapter examines the role that the Codringtons played in fortifying Antigua in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The intersection of civic, military, and economic leadership expected of the Codringtons, are foregrounded by how local politics dominated the placement and funding of Antigua’s fortifications rather than as part of an imperializing project directed from Britain. Using the lens of locality, Waters shows how fortification of Antigua demonstrates how early planation society formed, as well as reinforcing the autonomy of the Antiguan government within the colonial system.