Suchergebnisse

A brief supplemental text for upper level undergraduate courses in comparative political economy, comparative public policy, and American political economy. The book's six chapters look in detail at the political economies of the U.S., Sweden and Germany, exploring the fundamental differences between their handling of health policy, pensions, family policy, corporate governance and fiance, and labor markets. The book's many rich and well rendered examples of the three countries' various policies helps students push past abstractions and understand what it is actually like to live under different capitalist systems.

This article uses a case study of vocational training in Norway to explore the conditions under which employers will cooperate to increase the skill level of their workforce. It generates two sets of insights into the political economy of training in coordinated market economies. First, by demonstrating that cooperation among employers was a recent achievement that required the creation of specific, targeted mechanisms, it suggests that a cooperative outcome is difficult to attain, even amid the generally hospitable institutional environment characteristic of these economies. Second, it demonstrates that the employer collective action problem with respect to the initial training of apprentices differs from that posed by the additional raining of experienced workers. This means that even within a single economy, there are several varieties of training politics, each characterized by different patterns of cooperation and conflict; this further complicates the task of creating a coordinated training regime.

Recent research indicates that centralized collective bargaining institutions are more resilient than predicted by the conventional wisdom, which viewed them as incompatible with new competitive conditions and newproduction strategies. Drawing on a case study of Norway, the author argues that one reason for this resilience is that centralized wage setting may be actively supported by employers because it serves important employer interests. It has helped moderate wage growth, reduced transaction costs, contributed to stable industrial relations, and provided political leverage for employer organizations. The author also argues that institutional change must be viewed in terms of its economic and institutional context. There has been some formal devolution of bargaining capacity to the level of the individual firm in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. However, these changes have been accompanied by institutional changes, instigated by employers, that have increased the coordinating capacity of labor market actors. Labor markets in all three countries remain highly institutionalized.

The hypothesis that engineering graduates are best suited for junior officer positions aboard increasingly sophisticated surface and submarine warships is tested empirically for a subset of 1,560 U.S. Naval Academy graduates from the classes 1976-80. Following the guidelines set by Admiral Rickover, policymakers presume the best preparation for leadership positions is provided by college majors that emphasize mathematics, sciences, and (especially) engineering. The results of the study, based on advanced multivariate regression techniques, fail to support this common notion. For the subset of USNA graduates, neither academic major selection nor achievement within defined academic class groupings is found to be statistically related to performance and retention of junior officers at the completion of their initial tour of duty. The results are applicable to both the conventional surface and nuclear navies for the subset of academy graduates. The study suggests the approach be applied to the Officer Candidate School and the Reserve Officers' Training Corps commissioned officers for a more general test of the Rickover hypothesis.