Varieties of Capitalism

Abstract Scholarship on varieties of capitalism (VofC) explores the ways in which the institutions structuring the political economy affect patterns of economic performance or policy making and the distribution of well‐being. Contesting the claim that there is one best route to superior economic performance, a number of schemas have been proposed to explain why countries have often been able to secure substantial rates of growth in different ways, often with relatively egalitarian distributions of income. Prominent among them is a VofC analysis focused on the developed democracies that distinguishes liberal and coordinated market economies according to the ways in which firms coordinate their endeavors. On the…