Suchergebnisse

The role of macroeconomic policy in the different varieties of capitalism has been largely ignored. Recent contributions to the literature have argued that nonliberal economies should be expected to have less accommodating (i.e., less countercyclical) macroeconomic policies than liberal varieties. Using time-series cross-section data on 18 OECD countries between 1980 and 2002, this paper tests that hypothesis and, more particularly, whether the reaction of discretionary fiscal policy to macroeconomic shocks is conditioned by variables that differentiate liberal from nonliberal varieties of capitalism: the degree of generosity of the social protection system, the degree of coordination of wage bargaining, and the fragmentation of the political party system. The test results do not support the conclusion that nonliberal economies' macroeconomic policy would be less countercyclical than that of liberal economies. On the contrary, discretionary fiscal policy has been more countercyclical in countries with a fragmented political system or a generous social protection system.

Standard economic wisdom generally stresses the benefits of increased competition on the product market. This paper proposes a model of monopolistic competition with an endogenous determination of workers flows in and out of unemployment, where wages are determined according to an efficiency wage mechanism. We show that an increase in product market competition boosts the hiring rate as well as the separation rate. Hence, the efficiency wage schedule compatible with more competition shifts upward. An adverse effect on workers' incentive is at work which pushes real wages up to the point that increased competition may indeed generate employment losses rather than gains.

This paper proposes an analysis of the social bloc that could support the political strategy of a radical change of socio-economic model in France. The bloc bourgeois would gather the most well-off and educated groups of the traditional left and right social blocs that had structured French political competition until then. The analysis is based on French survey data on policy preferences. With the help of a latent class model, a partition of the French electorate in several clusters is analysed. This sheds light on the composition of the respective social bases of the left and the right as well as on the possibility of existence of the bloc bourgeois.