Diversity in Employment Patterns in North-West Europe : A Regional and Sectoral Approach
The decline in Germany's capacity to provide employment for its population has become one of the most discussed economic questions of the turn of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. It is a change that has occurred despite the economy's continuing strong performance on the most obvious criterion of national competitiveness: capacity to sell goods abroad. Particularly puzzling from some perspectives is that the two parts of Europe that out-perform Germany on employment – the United Kingdom and the Nordic Countries – are often considered in the literature on capitalist diversity to differ from Germany in opposite ways. For example, in the dichotomized world of Hall and Soskice (2001) the UK is a paradigm case of a liberal market economy, while the Nordic countries are, like Germany, coordinated market economies. Other observers claim that the Nordics and the UK both have low levels of labor-market regulation, but this only works if certain forms of government regulation are considered: the Nordic countries have more powerful trade unions and legislation governing the work environment than either Germany or the UK. That in post-industrial economies both so-called 'liberal' and 'social demo-cratic' welfare states might have a superior capacity to generate employment than so-called 'corporatist' ones was anticipated some years ago by Esping-An-dersen (1999). In his scheme the UK, the Nordics, and Germany were clear representatives of these respective types. In free-market economies, he argued, there was a large gap between wealthy and poor populations, enabling the former to employ the latter at low wages and with low or nonexistent non-wage costs in low-productivity service jobs. Also, generous welfare states produced a large number of jobs in public services, many of which also existed at low-skilled levels. These two contrasting kinds of economy both developed a capacity to provide low-productivity jobs in services to replace those that had existed in Fordist manufacturing. Ebbinghaus (2000) reached a similar conclusion about these three country types following an examination of a different policy area: early retirement.
Varieties of Capitalism
Scholarship on varieties of capitalism (VofC) explores the ways in which the institutions structuring the political economy affect patterns of economic performance or policy making and the distribution of well-being. Contesting the claim that there is one best route to superior economic performance, a number of schemas have been proposed to explain why countries have often been able to secure substantial rates of growth in different ways, often with relatively egalitarian distributions of income. Prominent among them is a VofC analysis focused on the developed democracies that distinguishes liberal and coordinated market economies according to the ways in which firms coordinate their endeavors. On the basis of institutional complementarities among subspheres of the political economy, it suggests that the institutional structure of the political economy confers comparative institutional advantages, notably for radical and incremental innovation, which explains why economies have not converged in the context of globalization. Although this framework is contested, it has inspired new research on many subjects, including the basis for innovation, the determinants of social policy, the grounds for international negotiation, and the character of institutional change. In this issue area, there is promising terrain for further research into the origins of varieties of capitalism, the factors that drive institutional change in the political economy, how institutional arrangements in the subspheres of the political economy interact with one another, the normative underlay for capitalism, and the effects of varieties of capitalism on multiple dimensions of well-being. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
capitalism; 
political economy; 
globalization; 
politics; 
institutional change; 
economic growth; 
macroeconomics; 
innovation; 
complementarities; 
social policy
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo