German capitalism: Does it exist? Can it survive?

New Political Economy

Volumn 2, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 237-256

  Streeck, Wolfgang ^a  

^a MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIETIES   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITALIST SYSTEM; ECONOMIC DECLINE; NATIONAL ECONOMY;

GERMANY;

EID: 0031468511     PISSN: 13563467     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13563469708406299     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. The following stylised account draws on the typology developed in J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Philippe C. Schmitter & Wolfgang Streeck (Eds), Governing Capitalist Economies: Performance and Control of Economic Sectors (Oxford University Press, 1994).
2. Nothing in the above is to suggest that the institutional configuration that made up the 'German system' in the 1970s and 1980s was created in one piece, or created for the economic purposes that it came to serve. Some of its elements were pre-Wilhelminian, others were introduced by the Allies after 1945, and still others originated in the politics of the Federal Republic, sometimes drawing on and modifying older arrangements, and sometimes not. Moreover, each element, for example the banking system, was subject to its own historical dynamic. All were and continue to be changing, for their own reasons as well as in reaction to each other, and certainly there can be no presumption of a pre-established fit between them, even though one might want to allow for some reinforcement effects of the historically contingent, social and economic success of the 'model'. That its parts happened to perform together so well during the period in question must be attributed at least as much to fortuna as to virtu.
3. For more detail, see my essay on 'diversified quality production', in: Wolfgang Streeck, Social Institutions and Economic Performance: Studies of Industrial Relations in Advanced Capitalist Economies (Sage, 1992), pp. 1-10. Quality competition can be described as the pursuit of monopoly rents through product diversification. The latter can, within limits, expand quality-competitive markets by breaking up existing mass markets. Within quality markets, price competition is suspended as long as the price differential to less customised, substitute products is not excessive.
4. Wolfgang Streeck, 'Pay restraint without incomes policy: constitutionalised monetarism and industrial unionism in Germany', in: Robert Boyer, Ronald Dore and Z. Mars (Eds), The Return to Incomes Policy (Pinter, 1994), pp. 118-40.
5. Michel Albert, Capitalism Against Capitalism (Whurr Publishers, 1993).
6. Ibid.