In Search of National Economic Success: Balancing Competition and CooperationLane Kenworthy
Sage Publications, 1995
Reviewer comments
"Lane Kenworthy's excellent book is a significant contribution to the literature on competition, cooperation, and economic success…. The book is lucid, theoretically well developed, and offers a very organized and thoughtful approach to the issues of cooperation and economic competitiveness in the global market." – Joya Misra, in Contemporary Sociology
"This ambitious book, in my view, is destined to become a classic of comparative political economy. Kenworthy has constructed a systematic framework to explain the comparative economic performance of 17 of the richest OECD countries over the period 1960-90…. This lucid and thoroughly-researched book should be thrust into the hands of as many policymakers as possible." – Niamh Hardiman, in The British Journal of Sociology
"At the heart of the analysis and its most original contribution is the author's cooperation index, applied to 17 OECD countries, and examining cooperation at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels across all major economic relationships. [An] excellent study." – Colin Crouch, in Political Studies
"This is an important and valuable book…. The evidence is strong and multifaceted, and it sustains a major challenge to the market liberal orthodoxy of the Anglo-American world." – Geoffrey Hodgson, in Social Policy
"To this very familiar terrain the author brings a fresh analytical perspective…. The author's main thesis should be listened to and discussed further." – Göran Therborn, in Public Policy
Summary
For most of the past two centuries, conventional wisdom has held that national economic success is a product of free markets and competition. This "market liberal" view contends that the performance of an economy is impeded by government intervention, income equality, labor organizations, and nonmarket constraints on freedom of choice. In Search of National Economic Success assesses this thesis from a comparative perspective, drawing on case studies and statistical analysis of the 17 richest industrialized economies. I find the market liberal account to be largely inaccurate, and other prominent explanations of economic performance variation — which emphasize such factors as government activism, corporatism, flexible specialization, and labor relationships — to be inadequate. I conclude that the key to national economic success lies in balancing competition and cooperation. The nations with the best performance records during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were those most committed to combining competition with various forms of economic cooperation. Those faring worst relied predominantly on atomistic, individualistic competition.
Contents
Introduction
1. The Fall and Rise of Market Liberalism
2. The Efficiency of Constraint
3. Equality and Efficiency: The Illusory Tradeoff
4. Too Much Government?
5. Labor Organization and the Common Interest
6. The Economics of Cooperation
Appendixes
Notes
References
Index