ABSTRACT
Germany and Japan, as we saw in Chapter 3, are the two great standard-bearers of stakeholder capitalism, albeit in different ways: one largely through law, the other mostly in spite of it; one with relations organised largely at sectoral level, the other with cooperative relationships across sectors. They have also differed for some time in ownership and financing patterns. In this chapter we shall show briefly how these differences arose, and at more length how they contributed to the longstanding differences in technological performance and specialisation. We shall also show how Sweden belonged with them, 50 years ago, as a stakeholder capitalist country, but how it subsequently moved in the direction of shareholder capitalism (much more American than British) – and how this affected its performance and specialisation.
