Capitalism

About: Capitalism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 27714 publications have been published within this topic receiving 858042 citations.

The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth, and Equality

Abstract: Introduction 1. Collective political engagement and the welfare state 2. The political origins of coordinated capitalism 3. The political origins of Danish employers' associations 4. British experiments in national employers' organization 5. Sectional parties, divided business in the United States 6. The origins of sector coordination in Germany 7. Twenty-first century breakdown: challenges to coordination in the post-industrial age 8. Institutional sources of firms' preferences for the welfare state 9. Employers, coordination, and active labor market policy in post-industrial Denmark 10. Employers, coordination, and active labor market policy in post-industrial Britain 11. The failure of coordination and rise of dualism in Germany 12. The political foundations of redistribution and equality Conclusion: 13. Social solidarity after the crisis of finance capitalism.

Varieties of Capitalism and institutional comparative advantage: A test and reinterpretation

Abstract: How do national-level institutions relate to national comparative advantages? We seek to shed light on this question by exploring two different sets of hypotheses based on the Varieties of Capitalism and other branches of comparative capitalisms literature. Applying fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to data from 14 industries in 22 countries across 9 years, we find that comparative advantages in industries with radical innovation emerge in specific configurations mixing coordinated and liberal institutional features. Institutional comparative advantage in industries with radical innovation may thus be based on the “beneficial constraints” of opposing institutional logics rather than on the self-reinforcing institutional coherence envisioned in much of the Varieties of Capitalism literature. By contrast, we find that coordinated market economies may have comparative advantages in industries with incremental innovation, as envisioned in the Varieties of Capitalism literature. Our article contributes to our understanding of the “so what?” related to capitalist diversity and its implications for location decisions of multinational enterprises. We further present a coordination index going beyond Hall and Gingerich (Br J Polit Sci 39:449–482, 2009) with annual values for 22 OECD countries from 1995 through 2003.

Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise

Abstract: Chapter 1: "One short nap took me all the way back to before 1949". 1978-2008: 30 years of Opening. 1992-2005: 13 years of Reform. 2005: the end of Reform. China is a family business. Chapter 2: China's fortress banking system. Banks are China's financial system. Crisis and bank reform, 1994 and 1998. China's fortress banking system in 2009. The sudden thirst for capital and cash dividends, 2010. Chapter 3: The fragile fortress. The foundation of China's banking machine. Bad bank performance and its implications, 2009. The "perpetual put" option to PBOC. China's new post-Lehman Brothers banking model. Implications. Chapter 4: China's captive bond market. Why does China have a bond market? Yield curves in China. The base of the Pyramid: "protecting" household depositors. Chapter 5: The struggle over China's bond markets. China Development Bank, the Ministry of Finance and the Big 4 Banks. People's Bank of China, NDRC and CSRC: corporate bonds. Local governments unleashed. China Investment Corporation: the lynchpin of China's financial system. Cycles in China's financial markets. Chapter 6: Western finance, SOE reform and China's stock markets. Why does China have stock markets? What the stock markets gave China. Chapter 7: The National Team is China's government. The National Team, the Organization Department, Huijin and SASAC. Chinese stock markets: Who benefits? A casino or a success or both? Implications. Chapter 8: The Forbidden City. The Emperor of Finance. Behind the vermillion walls. Red capitalism means leverage. The Emperor's new financial playthings. Appendices.

Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy

Abstract: The Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi is one of the core theorists of the Italian postfordist movement, along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Bifo (Franco Berardi). But although his work is often cited by scholars (particularly by those in the field of "Cognitive Capitalism"), his writing has never appeared in English. This translation of his most recent work, Capital and Language (published in Italian in 2002), finally makes Marazzi's work available to an English-speaking audience. Capital and Language takes as its starting point the fact that the extreme volatility of financial markets is generally attributed to the discrepancy between the "real economy" (that of material goods produced and sold) and the more speculative monetary-financial economy. But this distinction has long ceased to apply in the postfordist New Economy, in which both spheres are structurally affected by language and communication. In Capital and Language Marazzi argues that the changes in financial markets and the transformation of labor into immaterial labor (that is, its reliance on abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation) are just two sides of the same coin. Capital and Language focuses on the causes behind the international economic and financial depression of 2001, and on the primary instrument that the U.S. government has since been using to face them: war. Marazzi points to capitalism's fourth stage (after mercantilism, industrialism, and the postfordist culmination of the New Economy): the "War Economy" that is already upon us. Marazzi offers a radical new understanding of the current international economic stage and crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form. Capital and Language also provides a warning call to a Left still nostalgic for a Fordist construct--a time before factory turned into office (and office into home), and before labor became linguistic.

The dismal science : how thinking like an economist undermines community

Abstract: See "Stephen Marglin on the Future of Capitalism" at FORA.tv. Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback - say the barn burned down - neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations. Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.