Looks at social corporatism, defining it as an economic system in which the labour market is organized by centralized wage bargaining and is non-exclusive and egalitarian. The focus is particularly on the links between the degree of corporatism and macroeconomic performance.

This book provides a definition of corporatism, an important task given the changes in definition since the nineteenth century and the current revival of intellectual interest in the subject as an economic system distinct from both capitalism and socialism. The definition permits the corporatist label to be extended to countries as diverse as Austria and Australia, and the extent to which these experiments have succeeded is also reviewed. The study suggests that developing countries and the previously centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe could do well to emulate the example of the successful corporatist countries in building the necessary institutions at an early stage of their development.