Review and discussion of Varieties of Capitalism by Hall and Soskice (original) (raw)

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

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

From Stages to Varieties of Capitalism: Lessons, Limits and Prospects

The basic aim of this paper is to take a tour de force in order to put the varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach in perspective and to assess its limits and further prospects. There existed before it a certain stages-ofcapitalism (SoC) approach with a long history. The SoC approach developed largely under the influence of social and anthropological stage theories of progress and of Marxism. Accordingly, capitalism as a mode of production was perceived as progressing through commercial, industrial, and financial stage. In this paper, this link will be recovered for the benefit of further scholarship. We emphasize that the VoC approach, by the weight it puts on efficiency tends to rank circumstantially the variety at issue, thereby implying occasionally a desirable move towards the more efficient form. This means that the elements forming a given variety may actually be matched with the successive stages of a certain progress.