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One currency area and many wage regimes. Why the Euro does not match the heterogeneous basis of the Eurozone. The Euro member states possess very different wage bargaining regimes. This heterogeneity shaped the diverging wage and price increases among European member states and therefore contributed to the real exchange rate distortions from which the Eurozone suffers since the introduction of the common currency. To show this, this paper analyses twelve Euro countries' nominal wage increases during the first ten Euro years, 1999-2008. Neither the Europeanwide export of German-style wage bargaining nor European-level wage coordination is likely to solve the problem of heterogeneous wage pressures. Therefore, it is not likely that Euro will work better in the future than it did in the past. Adapted from the source document.

On the occasion of the 25th birthday of Mancur Olson's "The Rise & Decline of Nations" (RDN), this article reviews the political science debate over Mancur Olson's theory on distributional coalitions. In RDN, Olson blamed societal organizations for the (above all: economic) decline of developed societies. This idea ran counter to the perspective of the debate on corporatism that reached its peak when RDN was published. I show in detail that, as a general theory, RDN did not succeed. As a heuristic, in contrast, the RDN perspective gained enormous ground among political scientists in the last years. The discussion leads to the question of why, contrary to Olson's projection, liberalization politics became possible in the last 25 years. The article finishes by identifying questions for future research. Charts, References. Adapted from the source document.

Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization than the Christian Democrats, although in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms the situation should be reversed? This empirical puzzle seems to contradict insights from comparative political economy and the varieties of capitalism approach, in particular. Social Democrats and trade unions adopted their liberal attitude to company regulation after World War II. In the 1970s competition policy was introduced to make Keynesian macroeconomic policy work. Since the 1990s labor favored shareholder- oriented reforms because they helped employee representatives in conflicts over managerial control. The analysis has implications for partisan theory, institutional complementarity, and conflict models in comparative political economy. Adapted from the source document.

In Germany -- different from France & the USA -- direct party finance provided by corporate bodies is legal. In order to predict both the willingness to donate & the specific distribution of the money among the political camps, a model is developed that takes the structural characteristics of companies as starting point. The model is based on data of the contributions of the 100 largest German companies in the election year 2002. According to this, contributions & their distribution depend largely on the presence of interlocking directorates & on the industry a company belongs to. In the year 2002, the 100 largest companies gave 55.8 percent of their contributions to CDU & CSU, 22.1 percent to the SPD, 17.7 percent to the FDP & 4.4 percent to the Greens. The PDS did not receive any contributions from the 100 largest companies. Two logics of party finance can be distinguished in this context: first, the systematic support for only one of the political camps in order to strengthen it; second, encompassing contributions cultivating all fields of the political landscape. Tables, Appendixes. Adapted from the source document.

The integration of European financial markets lags behind the integration of product & service markets with their quicker removal of trade barriers, & has suffered another setback with the adoption of the takeover directive in 2003/2004. The following analysis demonstrates that the removal of integration barriers is based on two cleavages: a party political conflict along the left-right axis & a distributional conflict between different national varieties of capitalism. The conflict between varieties of capitalism has greater explanatory power than the left-right conflict. The empirical chapter concentrates on the crucial vote on a comparatively liberal version of the takeover directive that took place in the European Parliament on July 4, 2001. It is argued that the creation of a single European financial market is unlikely -- at least in the short or mid term perspective. Tables, Figures, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

The concept of institutional complementarity is central to the recent debate on the internal logics of production regimes, redirecting our attention from the effects of single institutions to interaction effects. The article provides definitions of complementarity, coherence & compatibility & discusses the ways in which different authors describe interaction effects between corporate governance & industrial relations. It turns out that some of the interaction effects are actually direct causal links rather than effects deriving from complementarity. It is argued that complementarity may be caused by both structural similarity & incoherence, & that the concept provides only weak predictions with respect to institutional change. The article is followed by comments from Bruno Amable, Robert Boyer, Colin Crouch, Peter A. Hall, Gregory Jackson, Wolfgang Streeck, & an epilogue by Martin Hopner. 1 Table, 1 Appendix, 98 References. Adapted from the source document.