Jonah D. Levy

Globalization, liberalization, and national capitalisms

Abstract In an era of rapidly expanding international trade, investment, and capital flows, the capacity of national authorities to exercise meaningful coordination of the economy is being called into question. One interpretation is that globalization is putting an end to nationally-distinct capitalisms: globalization is driving liberalization, liberalization is eroding sovereignty, and the final outcome is convergence on some kind of Anglo-Saxon, deregulated form of capitalism. This paper offers an alternative understanding of the relationship between globalization, liberalization, and nationally-rooted capitalisms. It puts forward three basic propositions: (1) that the turn towards a discourse of liberalizing reform stems as much from political and institutional considerations as from international economic pressures; (2) that liberalization generally entails a transformation of the purposes and forms of public coordination of the economy, as opposed to their eradication; and (3) that convergence is precluded both by intellectual disagreement as to the virtues of the Anglo-Saxon model and by differential institutional and political capacity to emulate this model. Taken together, these propositions suggest that rather than mechanically translating international pressures into the domestic arena, liberalization is itself defined and refracted by the political and institutional context into which it is imported.

The Politics of Representation in the Global Age: Identification, Mobilization, and Adjudication

Foreword Peter Gourevitch 1. Introduction: the politics of representation in the Global Age Peter A. Hall, Wade Jacoby, Jonah Levy and Sophie Meunier Part I. The Politics of Interest Representation: 2. Discursive democracy and the construction of interests: lessons from the Italian pension reform Lucio Baccaro 3. Regulation released: the politics of consumer protection in postwar France Gunnar Trumbull Part II. Responding to the Challenges of a Global Era: 4. Globalization and the politics of trade union preferences in France Marcos Ancelovici 5. Public-private institutions as social and knowledge bridges: reconfiguring the political boundaries for economic upgrading Gerald A. McDermott 6. Reorganizing interests in Latin America in the neo-liberal age Frances Hagopian Part III. New Institutional Settings for Representation: 7. Blurring political and functional representation: sub-national territorial interests in European multi-level governance Simona Piattoni 8. Altering politics: international courts and the construction of international and domestic politics Karen Alter 9. Private regulation (and its limitations) in the global economy Richard M. Locke.

The Rise and Fall of State-Owned Enterprise in the Western World. Edited by Pier Angelo Toninelli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 320.

This book offers historical perspectives on the origins and purposes of state-owned enterprises in the United States and Western Europe, the performance of these companies, and the growing dissatisfaction with public ownership, culminating in a wave of privatizations over the past twenty years. It combines analytical essays on various aspects of public ownership with a series of country cases (Germany, Italy, Britain, France, Spain, Austria, and the United States). As is often the case with edited volumes, not all the contributors see eye-to-eye. The sharpest contrast is between the paean to the developmental state offered by Erik Reinert on the one hand, and the neoliberal understanding that informs the concluding essay by Louis Galambos and William Baumol on the other. For Galambos and Baumol, the experience of public enterprise teaches us that “there is no substitute for the profit motive and the rigors of fierce competition in eliciting growth of output, productivity, and innovation from the individual firm†(p. 308). The other authors, while closer to Galambos and Baumols position than to that of Reinert, nonetheless offer a more nuanced perspective on public ownership.