Book review
Farkas Beáta Models of Capitalism in the European Union, Post-crisis Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, xxi＋541p.
2019 Volume 2019 Issue 39 Pages 173-178
Details
2019 Volume 2019 Issue 39 Pages 173-178
The current difficulties of developing EU integration might be attributed to the diversity of European capitalism. Question is how the EU will handle its diversity.
Bruno Amable （2004） “The Diversity of Modern capitalism” has induced us to study further on the diversity of European capitalism with the EU new member countries included, and then to investigate changes in the diversity of European capitalism under the influences of the global financial crisis and Euro crisis since 2008. This book works on this challenging research topics straight from the front.
The content of this book consists of 3 parts and 11 sections. The first part is about literature review, devoted to institutional analysis of economics. The second part is concerning models and model-changes of the market economies under the global financial and economic crisis since 2008, which is the core of the research and analysis of this book. And the third part is about the relationship between European integration and the varieties of European capitalism.
This book is successful to depict both the diversity of European capitalism and its changes in total and in that of each EU member country in a well-balanced and fine-grained manner. It also has enough academic value as a textbook that gave us materials for considering the future of the EU integration.
The European Commission announced “White Paper on the Future of Europe” on March 1, 2017. Although five integration scenarios were presented in this Paper, “multi-speed integration scenario is said to be the most promising one. This scenario seems to be based on a kind of differentiated integration theory which is formalized by opening the present EU situation. Our next task is to clarify differences from that advocated by B. Farkas.
The outcome of this book is to show that we can analyze variety of capitalism of all the EU old and new member countries in the same single theoretical framework. However, it seems that academic and social consensus has not been achieved even in that respect. Our next task is to overcome this gap.
