The study of welfare capitalism is concerned with a founding question of political economy, namely how capitalism and democracy can be combined. Ever since the publication of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990, the answer was sought in identifying ideal types of...

Books reviewed: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, The European Union' Trade Policies and Their Economic Effects K. Dyson, The Politics of the Euro-Zone N. Vanhove, Regional Policy: A European Approach K. Cordell, Poland and the European Union R. Hall, A. Smith and...

The crisis since August 2007 provides an opportunity to observe the workings of good governance institutions under an extreme stress test and in radically different political settings. Institutions such as independent central banks, fiscal rules and regulatory oversight of public finances were...

Fiscal surveillance was developed as a supranational regulatory process to counteract short-termism and deficit biases in government decision-making. With effective monetary policy to stabilize the economy, restraint on the fiscal discretion of national governments was seen as the key to...

Das anhaltende Interesse an der Theorie monetärer Integration ist einerseits dem europäischen Einigungsprozeß zu verdanken, andererseits der Instabilität des Weltwährungssystems seit dem Zusammenbruch der Bretton-Woods-Vereinbarung. Die vorherrschende Theorie des optimalen Währungsraumes...

The sharp rise in household finance, both in debt and in assets, is one of the striking empirical facts about the US economy of the last two decades. But it is still not clear what caused it. Economists, both mainstream and heterodox, seek an explanation in financial market innovation and...