Alice Amsden Book Award 2025
The 2025 Alice Amsden Book Award Committee is delighted to announce the outcome of this year’s prize.
The Committee had an exceptionally hard task in 2025, with close to 40 outstanding entries on a wide range of important topics.
Among this exemplary field, two books stood out, and were indeed so good that it was impossible to choose an ultimate winner. The committee has thus unanimously agreed to award the 2025 prize jointly to:
The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China
(Princeton University Press) by Ya-Wen Lei
and
Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation
(Princeton University Press) by Kim Pernell
The Committee had the following to say about both contributions:
Ya-Wen Lei’s The Gilded Cage offers powerful insights into the policy and legal instruments that underpin the functioning of the Chinese state and its relationship with private firms through the lens of techno-developmentalism. The book shows how the state drew distinctions between “low end” and “high end” industries as a strategy for industrial transformation and global catch-up, while highlighting implications for economic growth as well as widening inequality. Based on extensive fieldwork by way of interviews, ethnography, and archival data, Lei examines the role of the Chinese state and the increasingly powerful tech companies, as well as their instruments of control and surveillance of the workers. It is a brilliantly insightful and meticulously researched work that unveils the paradoxes of state control and public participation in contemporary China with unmatched clarity and depth.
Kim Pernell’s Visions of Financial Order is a comparative historical tour de force that shows how financial market regulation is shaped by often-competing cultural conceptions of the social order. The book focuses on the evolution of banking regulation in the US, Canada, and Spain going back to the 1780s. Its cross-national comparison walks the reader through specific historical junctures and shows how political institutions represented principles of order and/or conflict, which in turn informed the developments in each country’s national banking regulatory system. Visions of Financial Order is a timely and masterful exploration of how national institutions shape banking regulation, offering a compelling and nuanced analysis that reshapes our understanding of global financial governance. By challenging dominant accounts of the drivers of regulatory change, Pernell’s analysis helps us to understand how the economy actually functions and, with luck, how to better manage it.
Taken together, these books represent some of the very best socio-economic thinking.
The Committee extends their warmest congratulations to the winners.