The Japanese challenge to the neoclassical economic orthodoxy: Identity and interest in Japan's policies toward the East Asian miracle and the Asian Monetary Fund

This dissertation aims at providing a holistic account of a recent Japanese challenge to the neoclassical economic orthodoxy by addressing two research questions below. The first question is why Japan proposed to create the Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) that intentionally excluded the U.S. from the membership during the Asian financial crisis in 1997. This dissertation's main original claim is that Japan's Ministry of Finance (MOF) officials' conception of Japan and the U.S. as two leaders of different modes of economic development provided the basis upon which Japan proposed to create the AMF. Such identity topography on the part of the MOF officials was internalized when they initiated the East Asian Miracle in the World Bank in 1993. Using the identity-intention theoretical framework I develop in this dissertation, I argue that the immediate cause of Japan's AMF proposal lies in Japan's interest in defending the Asian model of economic development. This was done by the MOF's attempt to set up the AMF as a financial mechanism for quick disbursement of funds to the crisis-affected regional economies in Asia. The exclusion of the U.S. from the AMF membership was a key factor for realizing such an interest.; The second question I ask is what made it possible for Japan to challenge the neoclassical economic orthodoxy since the mid 1980s. I have found that their shared “normal/abnormal” meaning structures about Japan' own development identities made this challenge possible. Their beliefs located Japan's development experiences in the context of the history of the world economy. On the basis of this state-led economic development as “normal” meaning structure, the Japanese developmentalists delegitimatized neoclassical economic orthodoxy's commitment to a universal development philosophy. They claimed that the state-led economic development has been a normal practice for all the successful late-industrializers, rather than just an alternative, atypical possibility to economic development.; Throughout the analysis, I focus on “identity,” a relational social construct, as a critical source enabling the constitutive power of human interpretation to generate such a social effect as the Japanese challenge, which was enacted domestically and projected internationally.