Leveling the Playing Field: Transnational Regulatory Integration and Development

Emerging market countries are currently facing the dual challenge of incorporating transnational regulations into their societies while building their own versions of regulatory capitalism. This raises a multitude questions and challenges. Will the diffusion of international public and private regulations of developed countries, benefit a few and marginalize less developed countries? Or, can these regulations foster transnational public-private experiments to improve local regulatory capacities and social conditions? What kinds of strategies might facilitate or impede both transnational regulatory integration and local institutional upgrading? This book offers a fresh perspective in reconciling the seemingly incompatible goals of transnational integration and development. It offers a new analytical framework and a set of case studies that help forge a comparative analysis of integration and development. It offers both the identification of the mechanisms that can foster lasting transnational integration settlements and broad based domestic institutional and economic upgrading. This multidisciplinary study draws on current research from many leading scholars. They analyse issues in a variety of regions around the world and in industries and domains ranging from food safety, manufacturing, telecommunications, finance, as well as labour and environmental rights. The chapters reveal concrete lessons for scholars and practitioners alike, around the different roles and strategies that governments, the multilaterals, firms, and NGOs can take, to facilitate the integration of international standards, improve domestic institutions, and expand the benefits to a great variety of local groups.

Table of Contents:
1: Laszlo Bruszt and Gerald A. McDermott: Introduction: The Governance of Transnational Regulatory Integration and Development Part I: Statics and Dynamics in Regional TIRS with Rule Takers and Hegemons 2: Gerald A. McDermott and Belem Avendaño Ruiz: The Dual Paths of Transnational Integration and Institutional Upgrading for Mexican Food Safety 3: László Bruszt and Julia Langbein: Strategies of Regulatory Integration via Development: The integration of the Polish and Romanian dairy industries into the EU single market 4: Michael J. Piore and Andrew M. Schrank: Transnational Integration and Labor Market Regulation in Mexico and Beyond 5: Mark Aspinwall: The NAFTA Side Agreements and Governance in Mexico 6: Liliana B. Andonova and Ioana A. Tuta: Greener Together? Transnational Networks and Environmental Protection in the Enlarged EU 7: Aneta Spendzharova and Milada Anna Vachudova: Strategies for Integration in the EU's Pre-Accession Process: Reshaping Party Positions and State Institutions Part II: Emerging TIRs in the Global South: Blockage and Coordination in the Mercosur 8: Moises Costa and Wade Jacoby: Informal Drivers of Regional Regulatory Integration: The Auto Sector in Central Europe and Latin America 9: Miguel F. Lengyel and Valentina Delich: Multiple Paths towards Regime Building?: SPS Regulation in the MERCOSUR Part III: Fragmentation and Regime Complexity in TRRs 10: Christine Overdevest and Jonathan Zeitlin: Assembling an Experimentalist Regime: Transnational Governance Interactions in the Forest Sector Revisited 11: Jacint Jordana and David Levi-Faur: Regional Integration and Transnational Regulatory Regimes: The Polycentric Architecture of Governance in Latin American Telecommunications 12: Katharina Pistor: Transnational Regulatory Regimes in Finance: A Comparative Analysis of their (Dis-)Integrative Effects Bibliography

About the Author :
Laszlo Bruszt is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the European University Institute, Firenze. His earlier research on the economic and political transformation in the post-communist countries resulted in several scholarly articles and the award-winning book (with David Stark) Post-Socialist Pathways. His current work on the interplay between transnationalization, institutional development and economic change has resulted in articles in such scholarly journals as Review of International Political Economy and Studies in Comparative International Development as well as the edited volume (with Ronald Holzhacker) The Transnationalization of States, Economies and Civil Societies. New Modes of Governance in Europe (Springer, 2009). Gerald A. McDermott is Associate Professor of International Business at the Darla Moore School of Business of the University of South Carolina and is a Senior Research Fellow at IAE Business School in Argentina. He was previously Assistant Professor of Multinational Management at the Wharton School of Business. He specializes in international business and political economy, mainly on issues of institutional change, innovation, risk, and corporate strategy in emerging market countries, particularly East-Central Europe and Latin America. His book, Embedded Politics: Industrial Networks and Institutional Change in Post-Communism (University of Michigan Press, 2002), was a finalist for APSA's 2003 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the Best Book on government, politics, and international affairs.

Review :
Leveling the Playing Field is a wonderfully rich and engaging book that brings politics back into discussions of transnational regulation. By showing how efforts to diffuse transnational regulations across different geographies and policy arenas must navigate and are ultimately shaped by different political cleavages/struggles both within and across different national political economies, this book provides students of comparative political economy and development with a rich set of cases that shed light of the contested nature of these processes. [continued below] The combination of rich case studies and accessible theoretical framing allows readers to understand how the details of the individual cases aggregate into distinct patterns/strategies/trajectories of regulatory harmonization, with very different developmental consequences. This volume will serve as a handbook for scholars of transnational regulation for years to come. This book is a welcome addition to the rich literature on transnational regulatory governance. Its focus on emerging market countries and the challenges they face when balancing national development and transnational regulatory integration is highly novel and original. Served by a great cast of contributors and masterly coordinated by the editors, this collection is not only a must read, it also happens to be extremely interesting! In Leveling the Playing Field, Bruszt and Mcdermott have put together an interesting and very relevant book dealing with the problems of development in a rapidly globalizing world. The authors of the individual chapters explore the issues raised at the intersection of transnational regulatory integration and national development in a range of regions across a number of industries. This book should be valuable reading for anyone interested in the problems of national development in an increasingly integrated global economy.