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.
Richard M. Locke, Howard R. Swearer Director of the Watson Institute, Brown University
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!
Marie Laure Djelic, Professor ESSEC Business School
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.
Stephen J. Kobrin, William Wurster Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania