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The corporate governance systems of continental Europe have traditionally been quite different to those of the liberal market economies (e.g., the United States and the United Kingdom). Company ownership has been dominated by incumbent blockholders, with a relatively minor role for minority shareholders and institutional investors. However, since the mid‐1990s, European corporations have adopted many of the characteristics of the Anglo‐American shareholder model. Furthermore, such an increased shareholder orientation has coincided with a significant role for the Left in European government. This presents a puzzle, as conventional wisdom does not conceive of the European Left as the natural ally of pro‐shareholder capitalism. This book provides an analysis of this paradox by arguing that the postwar support of the European Left for the prevailing blockholder‐dominated corporate system depended on the willingness of blockholders to share economic rents with employees, both through higher wages and greater employment stability. However, during the 1990s, product markets became more competitive in many European countries. The sharing of rents between social actors became increasingly difficult to sustain. In such an environment, the Left chose to relinquish its traditional social partnership with blockholders and embraced many aspects of the shareholder model. The hypothesis is initially explored through a panel data econometric analysis of fifteen non‐liberal market economies. Subsequent case study chapters examine the political economy of recent corporate governance change in Germany and Italy.

This book examines the relationship between law and economic globalization. It focuses on national and international efforts to protect the competitive process, exploring the critically important relationships between those two domains and the way the resulting system shapes economic activity in all parts of the world. The laws, institutions, and principles of the international domain increasingly influence national competition law development, and national competition law experience provides both the lenses through which decision makers view transnational competition issues and the incentive structures that generate their competition law decisions. The analysis examines the ideas, institutions, and people that provide the legal framework for global competition; how they evolved, how they operate today, and the forces that are likely to influence their future development. US anti-trust experience has long been at the center of this global governance picture, but European competition law experience is also rich, varied, and potentially of great value for future competition law development. China, Japan, Korea, and newer players in Latin America and Africa will also play a key role in this future, and the analysis pays close attention to them as well. On the basis of this analysis, the book analyzes current global competition law proposals and outlines a strategy that utilizes these discussions, but more specifically addresses global economic development needs. This strategy may be developed within the institutional framework of the WTO, but it may also be pursued independently.

Sheds some light on how markets develop. In particular, it suggests that the ‘new economy’ is not much different from the ‘old economy’ and that in general, the early evolution of markets can significantly shape their later structure. The main arguments are elaborated in four chapters, each of them extensively illustrated with product‐case studies (internet, automobiles, television, or mobile phones, etc.). Ch. 2 explores the drivers of innovation and concludes that new technologies are basically pushed on to the market from the supply side. Ch. 3 looks at the dynamics of entry in a new market. Ch. 4 deals with the emergence of a dominant design as a consensus good. Ch. 5 shows how the dominant design shapes the nature of the competition in the new mass market and describes the logistical growth pattern characteristic of most new markets. The last chapter is devoted to sketch out the basic features of market evolution that follow from the events in the early stages of development.

Perfect competition provides a model of a frictionless economy in which economic agents behave independently of each other, abandoning to the market the task of coordinating their individual decisions. This model is extensively studied in traditional price theory textbooks.

Imperfect competition is the paradigm that develops when, on the contrary, economic agents interact in a conscious manner, which is necessarily the case when competition takes place ‘among the few’. In this system, agents act strategically, taking into account the impact of their own decisions on competitors ‘behaviour and on the price mechanism. Such situations commonly arise when firms differentiate their products, erect strategic entry barriers, or exploit the imperfect information of their customers about the price or characteristics of their product.

This book explores the theoretical richness of these economic contexts, using some basic concepts of game theory. The four assumptions underlying the paradigm of perfect competition (no barriers to entry, large number of agents, product homogeneity, and perfect information) constitute the natural departure points of the theories of imperfect competition: whenever at least one of these assumptions is violated, imperfect competition is present. The framework of the book is organized around the four corresponding themes: the role of collusion and entry barriers in the degree of market competition (Ch. 3), product differentiation (Ch. 4) and the information of agents as an instrument of competition (Ch. 5). Finally, Ch. 6 illustrates the possibility of extending the theory to a general equilibrium framework.

This book presents eight essays on financial regulation, focusing on the European context. Essay one examines the concept of market-friendly regulation. Essay two discusses the need for stronger bank licensing principles. Essay three explores the changing attitude towards banking competition. Essay four discusses self-regulation by financial institutions. Essay five explores the increasing links between banking and securities activities. Essay six examines the organisational structure of financial regulatory and supervisory functions. Essays seven and eight discuss the abandonment of the coincidence between the jurisdiction of monetary policy and the jurisdiction of banking supervision, and the important role of central banks in financial stability, respectively.

Seemingly every day society faces a new ethical challenge raised by a scientific innovation. Human genetic engineering, stem cell research, face transplantation, synthetic biology – all were science fiction only a few decades ago, but are now all are reality. How do we as a society decide whether these technologies are ethical? For decades professional bioethicists have served as a mediator between a busy public and decision-makers, helping people understand their own ethical concerns, framing arguments, discrediting illogical claims and lifting up promising ones. These bioethicists operate in multiple venues such as hospital decision-making, institutions that conduct research on humans, and recommending ethical policy to the government. While functioning quite well for many years, the bioethics profession is in crisis. Policy-makers are less inclined to take the advice of bioethics professionals, with many observers saying that bioethics debates have simply become partisan politics with dueling democratic and republican bioethicists. While this crisis is contained to the task of recommending ethical policy to the government, there is risk that it will spread to the other tasks conducted by bioethicists. To understand how this situation came into being, and the solution to this problem, this book closely examines the history of the bioethics profession. Bioethics debates were originally dominated by theologians, but came to be dominated by the emerging profession of bioethics due to the subtle and slow involvement of the government as the primary consumer of bioethical arguments. However, after the 1980s the views of the government changed, making bioethical arguments not quite so legitimate. With this knowledge of the sociological processes that lead to this evolution, the book proposes a radical solution to the crisis, which is for the bioethics profession to give up on some of the work that it currently does so that it can focus upon its strengths, and change the way the profession makes ethical arguments.

This book is one in a series (Comparative Politics) for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. After an introduction, it has 11 contributions from leading scholars in the field, which present a critical overview of much of the recent literature on political parties, and systematically assess the capacity of existing concepts, typologies, and methodological approaches to deal with contemporary parties. The book critically analyses the ‘decline of parties’ literature, both from a conceptual perspective and—with regard to antiparty attitudes among citizens—on the basis of empirical analyses of survey data. It systematically re‐examines the underpinnings of rational‐choice analyses of electoral competition, as well as the misapplication of standard party models as the ‘catch‐all party’. Several chapters re‐examine existing models of parties and party typologies, particularly with regard to the capacity of commonly used concepts to capture the wide variation among parties that exists in old and new democracies today, and with regard to their ability to deal adequately with the new challenges that parties are facing in rapidly changing political, social, and technological environments. In particular, two detailed case studies (from France and Spain) demonstrate how party models are significant not only as frameworks for scholarly research but also insofar as they can affect party performance. Other chapters also examine in detail how corruption and party patronage have contributed to party decline, as well as public attitudes towards parties in several countries. In the aggregate, the various contributions to the book reject the notion that a ‘decline of party’ has progressed to such an extent as to threaten the survival of parties as the crucial intermediary actors in modern democracies. The contributing authors argue, however, that parties are facing a new set of sometimes demanding challenges, and that not only have they differed significantly in their ability to successfully meet these challenges but also the core concepts, typologies, party models, and methodological approaches that have guided research in this area over the past 40 years have met with only mixed success in adequately capturing these recent developments and serving as fruitful frameworks for analysis; the book is intended to remedy some of these shortcomings. It is arranged in three parts: I. Reconceptualizing Parties and Party Competition; II. Re‐examining Party Organization and Party Models; and III. Revisiting Party Linkages and Attitudes Toward Parties.

Protecting economic competition has become a major objective of government in Western Europe, and competition law has become a central part of economic and legal experience. The competition law of the European Union has played a key role in the success of European integration during the last four decades, and it is likely to do so in the future. In recent years, national competition laws have also become increasingly important, often creating tensions between national-level and European-level regulation. Yet, despite its importance, images of European experience with competition law often remain vague and are sometimes dangerously distorted. This book examines European experience in protecting competition, analysing its dynamics, revealing its importance and highlighting the political and economic issues it raises.