ABSTRACT
We recall that the dominant view has Britain and the United States in one category as ‘outsider-dominated’ or ‘liberal market’ economies which are, in consequence, specialised in high-technology sectors. We argued in Chapters 1 and 3 that there were important differences between Britain and the United States in their finance and corporate governance systems: notably, the United States had a great deal more insider control, particularly by founding entrepreneurs and their family heirs, and those managers not subject to insider control were more autonomous from ‘outsider’ control and pressure. Nonetheless, both countries belonged in the ‘shareholder capitalist’ category, defined by management as being only responsible to shareholders – not to employees or government. So did Switzerland, although it was clearly different from the other two, with weaker venture capital and stronger inter-firm links. In this, like the other ‘country chapters’, we shall look further into the differences, and give some historical background. We shall then show how they can account to a large extent for the differences in technological performance and specialisation that we shall set out during the chapter.
