| dcterms.abstract | This dissertation theorizes corporate power and tests its impact on income inequality in the globalization context. Three related questions are addressed: First, is state coordination and labor unionism significant in attenuating the detrimental effect of neoliberal globalization on income inequality? Second, to what extent does corporate power mediate the positive/negative effects of global capitalism on income inequality? Last, what is the mechanism through which systematic inequality is institutionalized in high-income democracies? In answering these, corporate power is conceptualized as a compound of quantitative power, directly observable in markets, and qualitative power, indirectly manifested in the relational aspects (i.e. institutional arrangement and public support). I collected the data of 29 countries for a nine-year period, 2002-2008 from multiple databases, including the UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality, global corporations’ interlock data (Murray 2012, Carroll 2010), political institutional data of the World Bank, the OECD labor statistics, and the Economic Freedom of the World. This dissertation from a comparative historical approach combined qualitative and quantitative analyses. The main questions are examined in three steps: First, fixed effects models estimated the corporate power impact, controlling for unmeasured country-specific factors. Second, random effects models estimated the effects of corporate influence via neoliberal state coordination and the union on income inequality, controlling for socio-political variables. Third, based on the results from panel-data analyses, a case study of South Korea was conducted by implementing a process tracing method to confirm causal mechanisms. I found that neoliberal state coordination increases inequality while different degrees of transnational corporate power are conditional upon state coordination. Also, the negative effect of corporate power on inequality appeared significantly sizable in countries with corporations that are G500 listed, financially expanding, globally central and highly autonomous in labor regime. While the union density significantly ameliorates the detrimental effect of capitalist expansion, its effectiveness has been decreasing. These determinants for income inequality are explained by the patterns of finance capitalism, state coordination suspended by outgrowing private sector, and asymmetry in labor market between employers and employees. Taken together, this study shows to what extent and how neoliberalism facilitated institutionalization of corporate power, and aggravated income inequality. | |
