ABSTRACT
Fifteen years have passed since the seminal work of Hall and Soskice (2001) on Varieties of Capitalism (VoC), and extensive literature has emerged since then, which can be structured into possibly four generations. The first, the classical school of VoC, mostly relates to Hall and Soskice’s work (see also Amable 2003) and the differentiation of liberal market economies (LME) (e.g., the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New zea-land, Ireland) and coordinated market economies (CME) (e.g., Germany, Japan, Sweden, Austria). The second generation is generally labeled post-VoC literature and aims at developing further types of capitalist models, mainly related to different regions or groups of countries. In this regard, the dependent market economy model (Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009) can be highlighted, but also the work of the Hungarian scholar Beáta Farkas (2011 and 2017), who analyzed Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in this framework. The third generation of VoC literature is called critical comparative capitalism (CC), and it mainly deals with more critical, global approaches and most current issues such as international economic integration (e.g., the Eurozone crisis) and tries to incorporate the demand side of analysis (see e.g., Ebenau et al. 2015; Farkas 2016). A fourth generation of VoC research is currently emerging, although this differentiation is made on a rather speculative basis. There are some works and signs indicating that VoC analysis has recently (during the last two to three years) moved toward intertemporal (instead of international) comparisons attempting to define and characterize historical phases rather than simply building valid models for certain countries or world regions. 1
