Business and Banking

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Abstract
As part of the postwar settlement, and especially since the 1960s, small European democracies instituted many entitlement programs and redistributive income policies. Each country has responded differently, however, to the economic stagnation that followed the turmoil in world trade and monetary relations of the 1970s. Comparing the recent history of relations among business, labor, and government in four countries, Paulette Kurzer addresses complex questions at the heart of contemporary debates in political economy: Why did the labor–business partnership collapse a decade earlier in Belgium and the Netherlands than in Austria and Sweden? Are Swedish and Austrian social democratic arrangements threatened as well? Kurzer challenges the assumption that the evolution of social arrangements between government, labor, and employers can be understood without examining the interests of capital and trends toward transnationalization. The politics of distribution changed radically in the 1980s, she shows, when new international financial opportunities resulted in both a decline in productive domestic investment and a de-coupling of growth from investment. Though at different rates, increased global interdependence enhanced the power of business and finance in each country while undermining the government's ability to carve out national economic strategies and sustain social accords. Business and Banking will be welcomed by political scientists, comparativists, political economists, economic historians, and others interested in finance and public policy.

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