The recent financial debacle was preceded by a long complex evolution in the way firms created value and organized. The fragmentation of production, intense global competition, and the information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled transformation of services are all part of a story that was framed by, and in turn further framed, ideologies of deregulation and self-regulation. In the aftermath of the crisis political leaders worldwide find themselves in a heightened double bind. On one side, the demands for rules allowing experimentation and innovation are sharpened as growth and job creation are needed; on the other side, the demands are heightened for the state to act and regulate markets to prevent future crisis. The article focuses on the development of ICT, the main general-purpose technology of our time, and how the the ways it allows value to be created interacted with the politics regulating uses and defining the winners and losers.

Double Bind: Governing the Economy in an ICT Era

In this paper, we discuss the role of the state in corporatist economies and its ongoing transformation in a globalizing economy. In these small open economies, the postwar state developed a distinctive supply-side Keynesianism model for growth and employment creation. Based on this model, the state lowered labor cost by coordinating centralized wage bargaining, lowered investment cost through favorable lending policies, and reduced workers’ risk-aversion towards skill training through generous social compensation. Since the 1980s, growing fiscal burden and capital liberalization led to a new supply-side model, focused instead on fiscal encouragements for investment in human capital and R&D. This strategy continues to prove successful for growth (in high tech market niches) and employment (in knowledge-intensive discretionary learning industries). Although the state reconfigured much of its supply-side function during the transition from the postwar to the early 21 century model, the exercise of wage restraint through tripartite bargaining remains a central pillar throughout.

The Corporatist Political Economies: From Industrial Corporatism to the Social Investment State in the Knowledge Intensive Service Economy

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/epa2.1175

Three years of COVID‐19 pandemic: Coping with crisis governance in the long term

Creative corporatism: Institutional innovation and high -technology competition in Northern Europe

This paper argues that "following the science” is not always the best strategy. It does so by examining the first phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in three countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden. All three countries possessed highly respected infectious disease agencies with wide stakeholder involvement. Despite this, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish public health agencies underplayed the threat of the COVID-19 virus, discouraged intrusive mitigation measures, and were slow to admit their mistakes. Countries that trusted their national agencies, specifically the Netherlands and Sweden, witnessed higher mortality. By contrast, the Danish government marginalized its epidemiologists and suppressed the spread of the virus. The paper thus demonstrates the limits of trusting national scientific expertise, even when properly embedded within social networks, during periods of heightened uncertainty. © 2023 Policy Studies Organization.

Darius Parke Ornston

Papers

Creative corporatism: Institutional innovation and high -technology competition in Northern Europe

Follow the science: The European public health community confronts the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic