The Performance of Europe-wide Businesses: Has the Single Market Led to Scale Economies?

This article follows up earlier research which had found that in the 1970s and 1980s the incentives to invest in Europe-wide businesses had often been lacking or even negative: for example, the most profitable Europe-wide businesses were less likely to be European market leaders and were likely to have lower market shares than their principal competitors; they were less likely to be innovative, having entered the market as follower rather than leader. The author finds evidence that this started to change even before the single market and that the change has continued. The key success factors for profit in European business are coming closer into line with the success factors for growth – innovation, quality and intellectual property.     

The Future of U.S. Capitalism

In this work, Frederic Pryor tries to predict the future of U.S. capitalism through the year 2050. His laboriously constructed arguments, spread out over perhaps too many pages, offer the reader a decidedly downbeat future. Using a model that relies on three main dimensions—degree of governmental influence, degree of economic competition, and degree of social solidarity—he concludes that declines in economic competition and social solidarity may lead to a future where an oligarchic market economy may well prevail. While there is much to agree with in this effort, Pryors discussion is disproportionably devoid of the topics that are generally associated with the success of capitalism—namely, the issues of private property ownership, the efficiency of the price system, the role of the entrepreneur, and the benefits of competition. He argues that if capitalism is to survive, then individual self-interest, as we know it, will have to be replaced by a more communal type of decision making—one where people make decisions on the basis of mutual best interest.