ABSTRACT
The Great Recession and its aftermath have led to much questioning of the model on which US growth has been built historically. Indeed, while this model was still widely held as a paragon of economic efficiency across the world at the close of the twentieth century, more than eight years after the subprime crisis erupted, its image remains tarnished. As contagion of the US-born financial crisis spread instantaneously to financial markets across the globe (OECD, 2012), and from financial markets to the real economy, what began as a US recession rapidly turned into a global recession. The impact of this global recession on the real economy has been devastating, but has also led to a paradigm shift, reflecting the extent to which the American “model” in the normative sense of the word has become eroded. 1 Thus, while before 2007 the reality and desirability of “convergence” of national economies or “varieties of capitalism” towards the “best practices” associated with the American – or “Anglo-Saxon” – system might have been an object of dispute among economists (Coates, 2000; Hall & Soskice, 2001; Baumol et al., 2007), more recently this system has mostly been blamed for its flaws, bringing the second Pax Americana to a close (Azuelos, 1999; Boyer, 2001).
