ABSTRACT
International comparison is playing an increasingly important role in the theoretical and economic policy debate on the tertiarisation of modern economies. One group of authors (e.g. Klös 1997; Scharpf 1997; Anxo and Storrie 2001) claims to have identified a ‘service gap’ between several European countries and the USA, and regards the convergence of employment structures as both desirable and feasible. The implicit assumption here is that there is a sequence of similar stages in the development of the service economy that all countries must go through. On the other hand, at least since the publication in 1990 of Gøsta EspingAndersen’s book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, there has been a debate on the various types of capitalist welfare states, which, due to institutional differences and the phenomenon of path dependency, are not converging. This debate has recently been extended by the development of the notion of ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001). Taken together, these two notions suggest that ‘there is no convergence of systems in the commonly accepted sense of the term but rather an extension and specialisation of their comparative advantages within the various types of capitalism’ (Hoffmann 2003:130).
