The paper reviews the origins of the comparative study of capitalism and of the diverse approaches applied to it in contemporary political economy. It distinguishes four models accounting for differences in the institutional make-up of national capitalist economies, which it refers to as the...

Building on the results of a participant observation in a Chinese IT-sector company located in the northern part of China, this paper aims to clarify the nature of deception in markets. Contrary to the position of information economics and game theoretical approaches to trust, the paper argues...

Over the past decade, most OECD countries have begun to reform fundamentally their agricultural policies. Some dispute has emerged over the extent to which policy-making at the international level has triggered these reforms. These disputes raise important theoretical questions about how we...

Since the late 1990s, the music business has been experiencing a period of crisis. A new set of technologies digitization, data compression and the Internet - has forced significant changes on the industry. This paper analyzes the repercussions of this new technological constellation on the...

The 1987 Single European Act (SEA) is frequently identified as a momentous landmark for European integration because it altered voting procedures in the Council of Ministers - substituting widespread qualified majority voting for the unanimity which had prevailed since the famous Luxembourg...

In der Europäischen Gemeinschaft wird die Problemlösungsfähigkeit der Mitgliedstaaten durch die Rechtsregeln der negativen Integration beschränkt,´welche nationale Maßnahmen ausschließen, die als Handelshindernisse oder Wettbewerbsverzerrung interpretiert werden können. Diese Regeln...

In der Erklärung des Aufstiegs Ostasiens sind die transnationalen, regionalen Aspekte bisher vernachlässigt worden. Das Papier weist nach, dass die Region Ostasien einen adäquaten Gegenstand für eine integrationstheoretische Analyse darstellt, in Bezug auf mehrere wirtschaftliche und...

In the comparative political economy of rich democracies there is a long tradition of classifying countries into one of a small number of categories based on their economic institutions and policies. The most recent of these is the Varieties of Capitalism project, which posits two major clusters...

What do we value? For markets to operate and for economies to grow, producers must attract purchasers to the products they offer. In advanced capitalist economies, market saturation and decline of demand are constant threats to markets. But how do we understand why actors desire the things whose...

Liberalisierungspolitik bezeichnet die politisch herbeigeführte und politisch legitimierte Delegation von Allokations- und Distributionsentscheidungen an Märkte und zielt auf Durchsetzung der Prinzipien der Eigenverantwortung, der dezentralen Entscheidungsfindung und der Konkurrenz. Viele...