Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und Dynamik institutioneller Standortbedingungen: Ein empirischer Test des „Varieties-of-Capitalism“-Ansatzes

Hall / Soskice (2001) distinguish economies by the institutional arrangements into which companies are embedded, and they predict industry-specific compara-tive advantages: Liberal market economies (LMEs) such as the U.S. will hold advantages in high-tech industries; coordinated market economies (CMEs) such as Germany will hold advantages in medium high-tech industries. We test this theory on data for 26 OECD countries. In cluster analyses, the two varieties of capitalism are affirmed. Liberal market economies specialize in high-tech indus-tries, and coordinated market economies in medium high-tech industries, as pre-dicted. In addition to the two varieties of capitalism, however, we identify as ad-ditional clusters the Mediterranean and the eastern European countries, and we find Japan as a special case. Moreover, the clusters cannot be considered as sta-ble: From 1990 to 1999, a number of countries moves, in terms of their institu-tional arrangements, toward the liberal market model.