Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery
Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery

Author: Dorothee Bohle

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-08-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0801465222

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With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three regional shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004.Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have established three basic variants of capitalist political economy: neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist. The Baltic states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital, open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare. The larger states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and substantial government power to enforce industrial policy. Slovenia has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive industries and neocorporatist social inclusion. Bohle and Greskovits also describe the political contention over such arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia. A highly original and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative analysis.

Diversity of Patchwork Capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Diversity of Patchwork Capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe

Author: Ryszard Rapacki

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-10

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0429614985

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This book is a comparative study which sheds a new empirical and theoretical light on the nature of post-communist capitalism in 11 EU new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe, or CEE11. Extending and modifying a well-established conceptual framework for comparative capitalism rooted in new institutional economics and economic sociology, it offers a better explanation for transition-specific and path-dependent factors inherent to systemic transformation. Based on a vast dataset, the book therefore illuminates the (dis)similarities among the institutional architectures in the EU countries. Thus, the book argues that the evolving capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe exhibits strong symptoms of institutional ambiguity or a "patchwork" nature which makes it a distinct category from any of the co-existing models of Western European capitalism. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative political economy, Eastern European politics, post-communist studies and more broadly to researchers in the fields of economics, European politics and the wider social sciences. It will also be of significance to journalists, policymakers, members of international organizations and consultancies with an interest in Central and Eastern Europe and in European integration.

Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe

Author: Grzegorz Ekiert

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-09-15

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780521529853

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This volume presents a shared effort to apply a general historical-institutionalist approach to the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism's collapse in Europe. It brings together a number of leading senior and junior scholars with outstanding reputations as specialists in postcommunism and comparative politics to address central theoretical and empirical issues involved in the study of postcommunism. The authors address such questions as how historical 'legacies' of the communist regime be defined, how their impact can be measured in methodologically rigorous ways, and how the effects of temporal and spatial context can be taken into account in empirical research on the region. Taken as a whole, the volume makes an important contribution to the growing literature by utilizing the comparative historical method to study key problems of world politics.

Diversity of Capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Diversity of Capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe

Author: Eric Magnin

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-07-13

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 3031049500

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This book explores the hypothesis of the emergence of a ‘dependent capitalism’ in Central and Eastern Europe. In a first theoretical part, this book presents the main approaches that structure the field of comparative capitalism and then examines this model shaped by the inflow of foreign capital. In an original way, it proposes to integrate the form of the monetary regime into the dependent capitalism analysis and to extend it to Balkan countries. The monetary regime is seen as complementary to the other elements of the institutional configuration of dependent capitalism. In the second part, the authors adopt a historical and empirical perspective. First, they demonstrate how dependent capitalism has emerged in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States over the last 30 years as part of the process of socio-economic transformation that began in 1990. The crisis of 2008 was an indicator of this dependence on Western capital. Secondly, they extend the analysis to the Balkan countries and show that dependence is even stronger for them, particularly in the monetary area, as evidenced by the implementation of currency boards or euroization phenomena. This book is of interest to academics and students, as well as to business and economic policy makers.

Varieties of Capitalism
Varieties of Capitalism

Author: Peter A. Hall

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 0199247749

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Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.

Transition Economies
Transition Economies

Author: Martin Myant

Publisher: Wiley Global Education

Published: 2012-04-13

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1118138090

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Transition Economies provides students with an up-to-date and highly comprehensive analysis of the economic transformation in former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. With coverage extending from the end of central planning to the capitalist varieties of the present, this text provides a comparative analysis of economic transformation and political-economic diversity that has emerged as a direct result. It covers differences between countries in terms of economic performance and integration into the world economy. Transition Economies seeks to explain and deepen understanding of these differences, chart the emerging forms of capitalism there, and provide country responses to the world financial crisis of 2008-2009.

Varieties of Capitalism in Post-Communist Countries
Varieties of Capitalism in Post-Communist Countries

Author: D. Lane

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-23

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0230627579

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This book sets the experiences of former communist countries as they head towards capitalism against the 'varieties of capitalism' paradigm, and provides a framework for comparing transformation processes, demonstrating how differing heritages of communist and pre-communist pasts are leading to different kinds of capitalist economies.

State and Society in Post-Socialist Economies
State and Society in Post-Socialist Economies

Author: J. Pickles

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-01-17

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0230590926

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State and Society in Post-Socialist Economies focuses on the reform economies of post-socialist Europe. It looks at how various projects of communism that emerged in have been and are still being dismantled and recomposed by alternative visions, institutions and practices of capitalist market economies and democratic polities.

The Diversity of Modern Capitalism
The Diversity of Modern Capitalism

Author: Bruno Amable

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2003-12-04

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0191608335

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This book considers why institutional forms of modern capitalist economies differ internationally, and proposes a typology of capitalism based on the theory of institutional complementarity. Different economic models are not simply characterized by different institutional forms, but also by particular patterns of interaction between complementary institutions which are the core characteristics of these models. Institutions are not just simply devices which would be chosen by 'social engineers' in order to perform a function as efficiently as possible; they are the outcome of a political economy process. Therefore, institutional change should be envisaged not as a move towards a hypothetical 'one best way', but as a result of socio-political compromises. Based on a theory of institutions and comparative capitalism, the book proposes an analysis of the diversity of modern economies - from America to Korea - and identifies five different models: the market-based Anglo-Saxon model; Asian capitalism; the Continental European model; the social democratic economies; and the Mediterranean model. Each of these types of capitalism is characterized by specific institutional complementarities. The question of the stability of the Continental European model of capitalism has been open since the beginning of the 1990s: inferior macroeconomic performance compared to Anglo-Saxon economies, alleged unsustainability of its welfare systems, too rigid markets, etc. The book examines the institutional transformations that have taken place within Continental European economies and analyses the political project behind the attempts at transforming the Continental model. It argues that Continental European economies will most likely stay very different from the market-based economies, and caat political strategies promoting institutional change aiming at convergence with the Anglo-Saxon model are bound to meet considerable opposition.

Narratives Unbound
Narratives Unbound

Author: Balázs Trencsényi

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2007-07-15

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 6155211299

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The first work that covers the post-Communist development of historical studies in six Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. A uniquely critical and qualitative analysis from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. Focusing on the first post-Communist decade, 1989–1999, the book offers a longer-term perspective that includes the immediate 'prehistory' of that momentous decade as well as its 'posthistoire'. The authors capture the spirit of 1989, that heady mix of elation, surprise, determination, and hope: l'ivresse du possible. This was the paradoxical beginning of Eastern European post-Communism: ushered in by 'anti-Utopian' revolutions, and slowly finding its course towards a bureaucratic, imitative, challenging, and anachronistic restoration of a capitalism that had changed almost beyond recognition when it had mutated into the negative double of Communism. Each individual chapter has numerous and detailed notes and references.