Bob Hancke & Martin Rhodes 
Beyond Varieties of Capitalism [PDF ebook] 
Conflict, Contradictions, and Complementarities in the European Economy

Since the early 1990s, Europe’s economies have been facing several new challenges: the single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (Vo C) perspective, first elaboarted in detail in the book Varieties of Capitalism (OUP, 2001), this book critically analyzes these developments in the European political economy and their effects on the continental Europeaneconomies. Leading political economists from Europe and the US debate how Vo C can help understand the political-economic challenges that Europe is facing today and how understanding these new challenges can in turn enrich and enhance the Vo C perspective. Thematically, the contributions to this volume are organised in four sections:* how the macro-economics of EMU have influenced different European models of capitalism, * how the Single Market programme was received in the different institutional regimes in European capitalism, * how welfare and labour market reforms are debated and implemented, * how European capitalism travelled east after 1989. Preceding this is a spirited defence of the Vo C approach by Peter Hall, and an introduction from the volume editors, considering the approach, and proposing extensions and amendments. This book demonstrates that the Vo C approach remains, as the editors put it in their introduction, a rich seam to mine, capable of accommodating new developments, and theoretically flexible enough to produce new and innovative hypotheses and arguments.