Suchergebnisse

This article examines the sociopolitical conditions for preventing market failure in public goods investment. Based on International Social Survey Program data for 17 advanced industrialized countries, the author compares economies with strong and weak institutions of interfirm coordination in how they encourage investment in skills and technological innovation and highlight the inefficiency of alternative investment strategies that bypass cooperation. With weak coordination, firms underinvest in skills and the labor market relies on academic education as an alternative, resulting in underutilization of human capital. Innovation intensifies skill demands and can reduce overeducation. However, without cooperation, firms also underinvest in research and development, and the economy relies on innovation from outside the firm, which reduces its effectiveness in alleviating overeducation. In countries with weak interfirm coordination, the economy suffers simultaneously from deficient skills, underused academic qualifications, and technological innovations with limited human capital benefits for the labor force.

Building on the varieties of capitalism thesis of comparative advantages in technological innovation, the authors theorize the effect of sociopolitical coordination from a dynamic perspective and then apply the dynamic theories to the political economy of employment, in comparison to the existing employment literature situated in a constant-technology context. Based on cross-sectional survey as well as pooled time-series aggregate data, the authors argue that new technologies not only increase productivity through process innovation but also generate rents through product innovation. By preventing opportunistic behavior between firms, sociopolitical coordination intensifies reciprocal sharing of innovation, which increases productivity returns but dilutes rents, leading to comparative advantage in process over product innovation. Because process innovation is labor saving but product innovation is employment friendly, interfirm coordination further leads to comparative disadvantage in job creation from innovation. In other words, the Anglo-Saxon employment creation advantage, currently identified on the static basis of noninnovative low-skill industries, is reinforced by a similar advantage from the dynamic perspective, based on strength in job-friendly innovation.

Jingjing Huo compares how affluent capitalist economies differ in their patterns of technological innovation. Building on the 'varieties of capitalism' literature, he goes beyond the traditional focus on 'radical versus incremental innovation' in existing scholarship, and takes the comparison of capitalism to an entirely new set of questions around technological innovation

Abstract
While indirect taxes can fall on both consumption and investment spending, there has been little discussion on how governments may tax these two types of expenditure differentially. This article shows that the choice between taxing consumption and investment spending has important distributive implications for left governments as the traditional defenders of redistribution. In particular, when left governments increase taxes on investment relative to consumption expenditure, the higher price of investment relative to consumption goods drives up the labor share of corporate income, lowers corporate saving and reduces corporate net lending. Because this labor share strategy of redistribution is likely to antagonize capital, left governments tend to pursue it more intensely when corporatism has declined. I test these arguments using data across 12–14 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from the 1970s to 2010.