Coordination of Economic Actors and Social Systems of Production

Abstract

This volume addresses several distinctive but interrelated problems. First, it is very much concerned with identifying the various institutional mechanisms by which economic activity is coordinated, with understanding the circumstances under which these various mechanisms are chosen, and with comprehending the logic inherent in different coordinating mechanisms. Throughout Eastern and Western Europe as well as in North America during the 1980s, there was a dramatic shift toward a popular belief in the efficacy of self-adjusting market mechanisms. Indeed, the apparent failure of Keynesian economic policies, the strains faced by the Swedish social democratic model, and the collapse of Eastern block economies led many journalistic observers to argue that capitalism is a system of free markets that has finally triumphed. Some added that the more pervasive the market could become, the more impressively national economies would perform.