Business and Banking : : Political Change and Economic Integration in Western Europe / / Paulette Kurzer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Kurzer, Paulette,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1993
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Cornell Studies in Political Economy
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)

As part of the postwar settlement, and especially since the 1960s, small European democracies instituted many entitlement programs and redistributive income policies. Each country has responded differently, however, to the economic stagnation that followed the turmoil in world trade and monetary relations of the 1970s. Comparing the recent history of relations among business, labor, and government in four countries, Paulette Kurzer addresses complex questions at the heart of contemporary debates in political economy: Why did the labor–business partnership collapse a decade earlier in Belgium and the Netherlands than in Austria and Sweden? Are Swedish and Austrian social democratic arrangements threatened as well?Kurzer challenges the assumption that the evolution of social arrangements between government, labor, and employers can be understood without examining the interests of capital and trends toward transnationalization. The politics of distribution changed radically in the 1980s, she shows, when new international financial opportunities resulted in both a decline in productive domestic investment and a de-coupling of growth from investment. Though at different rates, increased global interdependence enhanced the power of business and finance in each country while undermining the government's ability to carve out national economic strategies and sustain social accords.Business and Banking will be welcomed by political scientists, comparativists, political economists, economic historians, and others interested in finance and public policy.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Tables -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Part I. INTRODUCTION -- Chapter One. The Theoretical Framework -- Chapter Two. Introduction to the Four Political Economies -- Part II. ECONOMIC RECESSION AND POLITICAL CHANGE -- Chapter Three. From Social Concertation to Neoliberal Restructuring -- Chapter Four. Holding Companies in Belgium and Austria -- Chapter Five. Transnational Corporations in the Netherlands and Sweden -- Chapter Six. Central Bank Independence in Belgium and the Netherlands -- Chapter Seven. Dependent Central Banks in Austria and Sweden -- Part III. THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION -- Chapter Eight. The Question of Community Membership -- Chapter Nine. European Integration in the 1980s -- Chapter Ten. The Future of Social Democracy -- Index