Jan Drahokoupil

From National Capitalisms to Foreign-Led Growth: The Moment of Convergence in Central and Eastern Europe

22 pages · 5.66 EUR
(November 2007)

I agree with the terms and conditions, especially point 10 (only private use, no transmission to third party)

Jan Drahokoupil emphasizes that most states of Central Eastern Europe – with the most marked exception of Hungary – embarked on strategies of national capitalist development in the early 1990s. It was usually the late 1990s that brought a shift to foreign-led growth. Investors started to relocate activities to Eastern Europe on a much larger scale than before, and the European Union promoted the interests of foreign investors in the accession negotiations. This facilitated the rise of the “comprador service sector”, which banked on strategies of foreign-led growth. Resistance to that strategy has come mainly from small domestic companies that cannot accede to the investment incentives and therefore do not directly benefit from the presence of multinationals as well as from some “principled NGOs”. Though foreign-led growth is the dominant tendency, it has taken different forms in the region as Drahokoupil emphasizes, drawing on the classification by Bohle and Greskovits (2007). There has been a focus on rather advanced industrial sectors and being less socially exclusive in the Visegrád states than in the Baltic States. Slovenia meanwhile has evolved a neo-corporatist model.