Very large firms, the rising significance of small and medium-sized enterprises notwithstanding, still account for most of the employment and wealth creation in Europe and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. They also to a large extent determine the political institutions that...

The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the "fiscal crisis of the state"...