Europeanization, Varieties of Capitalism and Economic Performance in Central and Eastern Europe PDF Download

Author: L. Cernat
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230501680
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
By combining insights from Europeanization, globalization, varieties of capitalism, and policy transfer literature, this book reconceptualizes the dynamics taking place during the EU enlargement process and makes a major contribution to the understanding of the relationships between institutional transformation and economic performance.

Author: Herman Willem Hoen
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781782543206
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
'Undeniably Good Governance in Central and Eastern Europe provides many insights in the political economy of institutional reform and constitutes an important contribution to the growing literature on "second-generation" reforms.' - Carlos Santiso, Democratization The implementation of a democratic order embedded in a market economy environment has proved immensely difficult. Furthermore, this process is subject to tremendous variety within Central and Eastern Europe. Ten years after the collapse of communism it was apparent that only Poland and Slovenia surpassed their 1989 levels of GDP. This book scrutinises the arrangements to enforce good governance in this area both by means of external help and domestic political leadership. From the popular assumption that transformation is a collective good, it follows that the problem of free-riding has to be faced. Consequently there is a danger that transformation may never be completed. This book empirically tests the relationship between economic performance and good governance focusing upon voluntary coercion as a means to prevent free-riding behaviour. The author examines the role of international organisations and discusses elite formation as an important element of good governance - something often ignored in the economic analysis of economic performance.

Author: Georg Menz
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019156415X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Europeanization has often been conceived as a top-down process, necessitating implementation and adjustment at the national level. However, Europeanization can also be conditioned by bottom-up national initiatives. While recent endeavors in comparative political economy have emphasized the resilience of coordinated market economies, few detailed empirical studies have examined to date exactly how different European systems of political-economic governance cope with and respond to an European impetus for liberalization. This original study of the impact of the EU-induced liberalization of service provision on member states argues that innovative national re-regulatory strategies may be implemented in response to Europeanization. In permitting any company registered in an EU member state to provide services throughout Europe, new possibilities were created for the transnational posting of workers from low-wage to high-wage countries. However, high-wage countries could re-regulate the wage levels applicable to such employees. The exact nature of such response strategy is coloured by the respective institutional power that labour market interest associations like trade unions and employer associations command. Therefore, different institutionalised varieties of capitalism generate distinct re-regulations of the Single European Market. Drawing on detailed case studies of ten European countries, this volume bridges the gap between the rapidly unfolding scholarly debate on Europeanization and varieties of capitalism. It argues that both strongly neocorporatist systems of political-economic governance and statist systems are capable of creating swift, comprehensive and thorough national re-regulations. This applies to Austria and France, but also Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. By contrast, countries with less strongly embedded neocorporatist structures, in which due to organizational deficiencies trade unions face difficulties blocking employer demands, create liberal response strategies, permitting a stratification of wage levels. Hence, both Germany and the Netherlands implemented liberal business-friendly re-regulations. The volume makes the case for important amendments to existing accounts of Europeanization and varieties of capitalism. Scholars of Europeanization need to incorporate bottom-up re-regulation into their conceptual framework, particularly in response to 'negative integration'. Recent strides in comparative political economy have placed great emphasis on continued divergence, yet this study suggests that even within the presumably unified group of 'non-liberal' coordinated market economies important institutional differences produce very distinct responses in the face of European liberalization.

Author: Barry Eichengreen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
In 1945, many Europeans still heated with coal, cooled their food with ice, and lacked indoor plumbing. Today, things could hardly be more different. Over the second half of the twentieth century, the average European's buying power tripled, while working hours fell by a third. The European Economy since 1945 is a broad, accessible, forthright account of the extraordinary development of Europe's economy since the end of World War II. Barry Eichengreen argues that the continent's history has been critical to its economic performance, and that it will continue to be so going forward. Challenging standard views that basic economic forces were behind postwar Europe's success, Eichengreen shows how Western Europe in particular inherited a set of institutions singularly well suited to the economic circumstances that reigned for almost three decades. Economic growth was facilitated by solidarity-centered trade unions, cohesive employers' associations, and growth-minded governments--all legacies of Europe's earlier history. For example, these institutions worked together to mobilize savings, finance investment, and stabilize wages. However, this inheritance of economic and social institutions that was the solution until around 1973--when Europe had to switch from growth based on brute-force investment and the acquisition of known technologies to growth based on increased efficiency and innovation--then became the problem. Thus, the key questions for the future are whether Europe and its constituent nations can now adapt their institutions to the needs of a globalized knowledge economy, and whether in doing so, the continent's distinctive history will be an obstacle or an asset.

Author: Beáta Farkas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137600578
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
This book uses comparative economic analysis to provide a common conceptual framework for all current European Union member states. Based on empirical investigation, the author identifies the Nordic, North-western, Mediterranean, and Central and Eastern models of capitalism on the threshold of the 2008 global financial and economic crisis. The chapters also examine the resulting institutional responses to the crisis and the methods of crisis management adopted by each member state. The analysis reveals that the crisis has not triggered radical institutional change but, instead, highlighted deep institutional differences not between the old and new member states, but between the Nordic, North-western, Mediterranean, and Central and Eastern European countries. These institutional differences are so significant that they require the rethinking of European integration theory. Models of Capitalism in the European Union serves as a useful handbook for academics, advanced students, policy-makers and advisors who are interested in European economic issues.

Author: Ryszard Rapacki
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429614985
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
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.

Author: Bob Hancké
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191525685
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Since the early 1990s, Europe's economies have been facing several new challenges: the single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspective, first elaboarted in detail in the book Varieties of Capitalism (OUP, 2001), this book critically analyzes these developments in the European political economy and their effects on the continental European economies. Leading political economists from Europe and the US debate how VoC can help understand the political-economic challenges that Europe is facing today and how understanding these new challenges can in turn enrich and enhance the VoC perspective. Thematically, the contributions to this volume are organised in four sections: * how the macro-economics of EMU have influenced different European models of capitalism, * how the Single Market programme was received in the different institutional regimes in European capitalism, * how welfare and labour market reforms are debated and implemented, * how European capitalism travelled east after 1989. Preceding this is a spirited defence of the VoC approach by Peter Hall, and an introduction from the volume editors, considering the approach, and proposing extensions and amendments. This book demonstrates that the VoC approach remains, as the editors put it in their introduction, a rich seam to mine, capable of accommodating new developments, and theoretically flexible enough to produce new and innovative hypotheses and arguments.

Author: Katharina Bluhm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136023445
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Business leaders exert extraordinary influence on institution building in market economies but they think and act within institutional settings. This book combines both an elite approach with a varieties-of-capitalism approach. Comparing Poland, Hungary and East and West Germany, we perceive the transformations in East Central Europe and in Germany after 1989 as being intertwined. Based on a joint survey, this book seeks to measure the level of the convergence of ideas among European business leaders, assuming it to be more extensive than the institutional convergence expected under the dominance of neoliberal discourse. Analyzing the institutional framework, organizational features like size, ownership and labour relations, and subjective characteristics like age, social origin, career patterns and attitudes of the recent business elites, we found significant differences between countries and the types of organization. The growing importance of economic degrees and internationalization shows astonishingly little explanatory power on the views of business leaders. The idea of a coordinated market economy is still relatively widespread among Germans, while their Hungarian and Polish counterparts are more likely to display a minimalist view of corporate responsibility to society and adverse attitudes towards employee representation. However, their attitudes frequently tend to be inconsistent, which mirrors the mixed type of capitalism in East Central Europe.

Author: European Association for Comparative Economic Studies
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Provides analysis of the impact of privatization on the economic performance of companies in Central and Eastern Europe. After considering theoretical issues, contributors provide an in-depth examination of corporate governance and company performance in advanced market and transition economies. A statistical and econometric analysis of extensive company-level data and interviews from a large number of firms between 1990 and 1997 is conducted to discover major factors in changing economic performance. The editor is affiliated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Violaine Delteil
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317402197
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Over a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall and 10 years after their accession to the European Union (EU), Central and Eastern Europe Countries (CEECs) still show marked differences with the rest of Europe in the fields of labour, work and industrial relations. This book presents a detailed and original analysis of labour and social transformations in the CEECs. By examining a wide range of countries in Central Europe, Labour and Social Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe offers a comprehensive and contrasting view of labour developments in Central and Eastern Europe. Chapters explore three related issues. The first deals with the understanding of the complex process of Europeanization applied in the sphere of labour, employment and industrial relations. The second issue refers to the attempt to link the Europeanization approach with an analysis mobilizing the theoretical concept of "dependent capitalism(s)". The third issue refers to the cumulative trends of labour weakening and labour awakening that has emerged, in particular in the aftermath of the crisis beginning in 2007-2008. This book will be of interest to academics, policy makers and stakeholders at European and national level in the EU member states.