Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

It has been ten years since A. Nölke and A. Vliegenthart (NV) published a seminal article on the specific variety of capitalism, identified in certain Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEE), namely the dependent market economies (DME). They argued that the multinational firm and its internal hierarchy is the main channel of economic coordination in the CEE region, dominating its institutional framework and organizing the socio-economic development. The thesis gained widespread acceptance in institutional economics, while the article itself has been broadly discussed and cited. In the meantime, the CEE group has been subject to profound economic and political shifts. On the one hand, its position in the global value chains organized by multinational corporations has been grounded, with booming industrial production and exports. On the other hand, the neoliberal regimes evolved, at least in some CEE countries, into right-wing populist governments. The DME variety, arguably, lies at the core of these both developments. However, can one still classify the CEE countries as the dependent market economies? In the article, we aim at reconsidering the original thesis of NV, appreciating properly its impact on the institutional thought. We conduct a review of major works commenting on NV, which developed their argument or highlighted different aspects of political economies in CEE. We discuss the nature of DME in CEE, in the face of most-recent developments, in terms of economic structures and political shifts. In particular, we make use of the global value chains theory to highlight certain aspects of the dependency.