Of the world's multiple national variations on a basically capitalist system, the paper compares the century's history of four--the British and American, the two "pioneers" whose institutions and economic behaviour patterns most closely confirm to, and those of Germany and Japan whose...

This paper reviews the implications of outsourcing and offshoring for the productivity of business services in the UK. Official statistics indicate that business-service productivity has grown by over 20 per cent in the last 7 years at the same time as employment grew by 20 per cent. The paper...

Two contrasting conceptualizations of skills lead one to attribute different roles to inter-firm networks. If skills are regarded as a public good, then inter-firm networks are like clubs that police the scope for firms to benefit from skills without paying for their acquisition. By contrast, if...