Abstract
There is much to like about this fascinating book, revisiting the Mediterranean model of capitalism. The editors put together a stellar cast of scholars to provide an extensive and compelling account of political-economic continuity and change in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
The book has very many strengths. I would like here to highlight two in particular. First, the editors do a fantastic job in the introduction of outlining, despite the diversity of themes covered in the various chapters, an overarching puzzle that runs through the book, namely the difficulties encountered by these four Mediterranean countries in achieving a stable and successful economic model. What’s more, the editors present a set of rival hypotheses that might explain the puzzle: a supply-side explanation focusing on the dysfunctionalities of Southern European labour markets, welfare states and industrial relations systems; a ‘periphery’-oriented explanation pointing at the marginal (in terms of both location and political role) position of Southern European countries in the eurozone’s architecture; and finally an ‘investment’ explanation, in terms of which low expenditure on R&D and human capital prompts a vicious circle of specialisation in sectors with low value-added and low innovative capacity. The latter, it emerges in Chapter 8, written by Burroni, Colombo and Regini, is the explanation identified in the volume as having the most purchase. This structure, in which an overarching puzzle and broad guiding hypotheses are set out at the beginning, testifies to the editors’ commitment to weave together the various contributions through a common analytical framework: a difficult and ambitious objective that they accomplish fully.
Secondly, the structure of the book paves the way for a particularly compelling and extensive investigation of Southern European countries, highlighting their commonalities and their differences. Indeed, the first part (Chapters 1–4) provides the ‘scope conditions’ within which political-economic developments take place in the four countries. These include what have by now become ‘classics’ in comparative political economy, such as Baccaro’s Chapter 1 on the Mediterranean growth model, but also covering topics such as public administration and state capacity, discussed in Capano and Lippi’s Chapter 2, that have been less central to recent research in this area, but that are nonetheless of vital importance to understand countries’ ability to implement reforms successfully. After examining the scope conditions, the volume moves on to a series of rich policy analyses (Chapters 5–8) covering the main institutional arenas that have been at the core of contemporary comparative political economy research (industrial relations, welfare states, finance and corporate governance, skill formation). Taken together, the two parts of the book offer everything the reader needs to know on Mediterranean Europe, combining careful empirical accounts and elegant theoretical takes.
As always, there is also room for some criticism. In particular, I would like to go back to the investment explanation that the book seems to favour. The lack of investment in human capital and R&D is provided as both an explanation for unsatisfactory past economic performance and as a policy prescription potentially to improve future economic performance. I would like to point towards three aspects that, in my view, could have been addressed more explicitly. First, what is the political feasibility of such a strategy? Put differently, how likely would it be that a political party running on such a platform would win elections? The question points to a broader issue that seems partly overlooked in the volume, namely recent work in comparative political economy on partisan politics (Beramendi et al., 2015). Second, to what extent is the broader economic context conducive to successful implementation of such a reform strategy? Some of the factors discussed in the first part of the book (such as the constraints posed by the wider eurozone architecture) might militate against Southern European countries’ ability to invest heavily in innovation-related policies. Third, given that the volume is explicitly inspired by the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework (Hall and Soskice, 2001), one might ask – in that spirit – to what extent would innovation-driven reforms of the type mentioned in the book require institutional realignment across other spheres of political economy and to what extent is such realignment likely to happen (for example, whether labour market and industrial relations institutions would be able to promote the high wages needed to reward and retain highly skilled workers)?
While further reflections on the political-economic feasibility of the diagnosis provided in the volume might have been welcome, this should not distract from the fact that Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited is an intellectually sophisticated and skilfully researched book: a must-read for all comparative political economy scholars.