From cocktail to dependence: revisiting the foundations of dependent market economies
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Recent contributions to the comparative political economy of East European capitalisms
have found that a distinctive variety of capitalism emerged in some new EU member states.
The new variety has been dubbed “dependent market economy” (DME). This paper makes
several contributions to this literature. First, it marshals evidence to show that this
institutional variety now includes the political economy of Romania, a case previously
excluded from it. More importantly, this analysis also finds that earlier scholarship on
dependent capitalism has failed to capture crucial mechanisms of dependence created by
transnationalized finance. Third, the paper suggests that some of the arguments made in the
existing scholarship on the interests of foreign capital with regard to domestic innovation
and labor training need to be qualified. Finally, by showing reflexivity towards select
critiques of the dependent market economy framework, the analysis proposes by this paper
is a self-limited attempt to bridge the differences between the varieties of capitalism and
Polanyian analyses of capitalist diversity in semi- peripheral middle-income states.
Description
This repository item contains a working paper from the Boston University Global Economic Governance Initiative. The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) is a research program of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. It was founded in 2008 to advance policy-relevant knowledge about governance for financial stability, human development, and the environment.
License
Copyright 2013 Boston University. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that: 1. The copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage; 2. the report title, author, document number, and release date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of BOSTON UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and / or special permission.