ABSTRACT
When farmers battle against a political power-sharing coalition of labor and capital owners, rural-urban cleavages emerge. When farmers win, an agrarian CME arises, as exemplified by the early nineteenth-century United States. Local banking facilities are expected to dominate. As the economy industrializes, increasing government intervention is expected to occur along with corresponding pressures for the diffusion of corporate ownership. These latter two features are examined in the context of the twentieth-century case. Moreover, pensions are unlikely to emerge in an agriculturally based economy, since it is only with the advent of industrialization and the labor movement that pressure for them arose, at which point farmers would form a coalition with labor in favor of publicly administered pensions. When labor and capital owners win, the classic example of a CME develops, as in post-World War II Germany. Financial assets are expected to be more specific than the LME cases, though more general than the Mediterranean or Agrarian or Statist CME cases as a result of pressure for concentrated corporate ownership, pensions that exhibit public and private elements, a centralized banking system, and indirect (or muted) government intervention. In this chapter, I discuss these two cases.
