Varieties of Capitalism Analysis

Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) analysis is a firm-centered comparative framework, set out by Peter A. Hall and David Soskice in their 2001 edited volume, for understanding why advanced capitalist economies are organized in systematically different ways. Its central move is to place the firm at the heart of the analysis and to ask how firms resolve the coordination problems they face with workers, owners, suppliers, and one another. The framework distinguishes two ideal types — Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) such as the United States and United Kingdom, where firms coordinate primarily through competitive markets, and Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) such as Germany and Japan, where firms coordinate strategically through non-market institutions — and argues that institutions in different spheres reinforce one another to produce distinct, durable, and internally coherent national models with their own comparative institutional advantages.