Varieties of Capitalism

Varieties of Capitalism and varieties of capitalism is a politico-economic explanation, take advantage of the economic, social and political scientists to analyze the differences between varieties of capitalist economic systems.

Formation

The approach has its predecessors in the field of neo-corporatism, neo- institutionalism and the New Institutional Economics and the recent economic sociology, especially Mark Granovetter. Main representative of the approach has been developed mainly at the Science Center Berlin (WZB ) are. Above her book of the same Peter A. Hall (Harvard ) and David Soskice (Oxford, LSE and WZB)

The theory can be summarized in terms of three characteristics:

• The individual company is the starting point. This means distinguishing feature between capitalist forms is what kind of coordination of economic activity of a company is the dominant. Thus, market relations, hierarchies, hybrid forms, but also cooperation and deliberation can be distinguished. Depending on which type is predominant, a country as a liberal market economy (LME ) or coordinated market economy (CME ) is called.
• There are complementary relations between institutions (institutional complementarities go to the economist Masahiko Aoki (Stanford ) back ). This means that the efficiency of an institution through the operation of any other ( complementary institution ) is increased. This means that economic systems are relatively stable structures: changes in individual institutions lead to far-reaching problems.
• Different incentive mechanisms within the systems lead to different comparative institutional advantages. This means that companies in a specific institutional structure are relatively better in the production of certain goods and services and others that operate in other environments. This contradicts a widely held view that different market economies to adjust to each other and to all a liberal system tend ( convergence).

Recent approaches try to divide the varieties of capitalism to couple with different models of welfare and electoral systems.

Criticism

The approach has been criticized mainly because of its static treatment of institutional change.

Approach maintained that he was functionalist - Furthermore, the varieties of capitalism is. One can not assume that actors, in fact, support the production configuration, corresponds to the "their" model of capitalism. In this respect, in many empirical studies is the erosion of the " German model" traced and contrasted with the postulated by Hall and Soskice stability of this model.

Main representatives of this criticism include Wolfgang Streeck and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.