The economic bedrock on which the Socialist Democratic governments in Northern Europe built their welfare state in the golden thirty years after the war were the export factories. The contribution of export factories was not only good wages, tax revenues and jobs. It was also the institutions and attitudes that went hand in hand with this mode of production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1.<\/strong> Businesses only grew if they managed to sell their product on the world market. Whatever privileges the state granted them inside the country, what ultimately measured was the quality and cost of exports. Within this framework, employers and employees had to negotiate wages, hours, training and technological upgrading. And not to load mediocre services and high costs into a closed internal market because they had a monopoly on it, as in other countries construction companies and banks did in the failed version of social democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2.<\/strong> European industry invested heavily in production processes that required skilled craftsmen. The cause was a combination of technology and social agreement, and the result was that the development of production was closely intertwined with a local community that possessed the appropriate skills. When parts of the process were outsourced to Third World suppliers, critical quality assurance departments remained at the center with well-paid workers. The social democratic consensus was based on skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3.<\/strong> Perhaps collective bargaining covered businesses that were relatively large and few\u2014not thousands of small restaurants and crafts. The unions had a clear picture of the profitability and endurance of each player. This allowed for a tripartite planning of employers, workers and the state by sector, with forecasts and feedback. It was corporatism, not an economy of impersonal rules to which each unit had to adapt after the fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After 1980 competition from Asia and the global dispersion of production reduced the incomes and employment generated by European factories. The socialist democratic model has lost the ability to cover the whole of society, but the institutions of consensus and planning as well as the prioritization of skills remain central to their economic policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the countries that want to change their fate should increase their exports a lot as a percentage of their GDP and at the same time change the composition of these exports. That is, more complex industrial products, professional services and software. At the same time training should be oriented towards productive skills and many employers should actively participate in it. The concentration of production in a few units and the accompanying corporatization may not be needed in today’s age of disruptive technologies, but more medium-sized enterprises are certainly needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The economic bedrock on which the Socialist Democratic governments in Northern Europe built their welfare state in the golden thirty years after the war…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5588,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[990,991],"tags":[1702,3739,25,3740,3741],"class_list":["post-10078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-feuilleton","tag-businesses","tag-corporatism","tag-eu","tag-social-democracy","tag-welfare-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10079,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10078\/revisions\/10079"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}