Varieties of capitalism in the twentieth century

Of the world's multiple national variations on a basically capitalist syste m, the paper compares the century's history of four-the British and America n, the two 'pioneers' whose institutions and economic behaviour patterns mo st closely confirm to, and those of Germany and Japan whose institutions mo st significantly deviate from, the prescriptions of neo-classical textbooks . There is no obvious story of a long and steady process of gradual converg ence-capitalist rationality slowly washing out the effects of differing cul tural traditions,. All four societies have changed in key respects; finance and corporate control structures were arguably more similar in the 1920s t han later By the end of the post-war golden age, there were signs of conver gence on similar forms of managerial capitalism. The crucial, and for Its u npredictable, question is how far the transition to shareholder capitalism in Britain and America over the last two decades will be duplicated in Germ any and Japan.