Iain Pirie is interested in the role that the changing dicates of international competitveness have played in shaping the development of particular national state forms over the last three decades. Over the last five years his research has examined the shift from a state-led to a neo-liberal development regime in South Korea. He is currently engaged in developing his research in three distinct but related directions. First, he is examining the convergence between structures of monetary and financial goverance in the UK and Korea over the last last decade. Given the radically different histories of these two national social formations it is remarkable how similar systems of monetary/financial goverance in contemporary Korea and Britain are. Second, he is interested in the parallels and differences between Korea's and Japan's experience of crisis and reform in the 1990s. Third, he is seeking to explore more systematically what the Korean experience tells us about the flaws in the current consensus surrounding carefully sequenced liberalisation and highlights the integral role that crisis must frequently play in processes of economic and political transformation

Recent Publications

Monographs:

The Korean Developmental State: From Dirigism to Neo-Liberalism, London, Routledge (2007).   

 

Journal Articles:

'Economic Dynamism and Social Injustice in Contempoary Korea', Critical Asian Studies, 38 (2) (2006).

'Economic Crisis and the Construction of a Neoliberal Regulatory Regime in Korea', Competition and Change, 10 (2006)

'Better by Design: Korea's neoliberal economy', Pacific Review, 18(3):1-20 (2005).

'The New Korean State', New Political Economy, 10 (1): 27-44 (2005).