On Growth Regimes in a Post Fordist Era

Growth patterns of knowledge based economies are still ill defined. They are in the making , presenting countries, in a phase of transition, with different adjustment opportunities. New forms of competition are developing on product, labour and capital markets. Large services networks are reorganising. Finance is playing a new role in controlling economic activities. Consumers are developing specific skills and tastes. Citizens are taking new habits and expressing new demands. All these changes take place in countries with rather diverse institutional backgrounds. There is thus little chance that structural adjustments to the new context should have to follow one unique best way. The panel will try to identify various alternative ways that could be followed by European countries to forge the growth patterns of knowledge based economies. It concerns not only the modes of diffusion of new technologies , but also their uses as well as the related organisational changes. The diversity of growth patterns implies that national policies should be different and that European policies aiming to develop a strong knowledge based regional economy, as expressed in the Lisbon strategy, should be accordingly differentiated. ** Can we characterise the growth pattern of contemporary developed economies as we did with fordism for the economies during the golden years of capitalism ? Has the process of today variable and sluggish economic growth some specific features that one could retain to account for economic outcomes and why they differ across countries Some see the present era as one of intrinsic disorganisation (see Lash and Ury, 1987); others concede that we are still in a period of transition from one growth regime to another. Few venture into sketching the main traits of the new growth process. The diffusion of the new technological system centred around information and communication technologies is only part of the story as the lasting productivity paradox reminds us. We shall assess some of these features of modern capitalism and discuss alternative growth regimes that could develop on these premises. Some of these characteristics may be transitory or their magnitude may change. We are at the beginning of a process through which trajectories of modern economies are progressively determined, depending on contemporary policies and institutional changes as well as on external events such as the globalisation of terrorism as manifest after September 11. The conjectures we make may never realised , still it is realist to consider them as having some likelihood or as ideal types that help to understand the mix we effectively will observe. Most likely countries will answer in their own way to today’s challenges. But centrally we believe that such early assessments are useful, especially in designing policies to prevent or one the contrary to favour specific outcomes. Some may argue in return that even Fordism never existed; countries were following their own path with very little common features, too few to ground a universal growth model of which national trajectories would be variants. I support the idea that such sketchy common pattern is useful as an idealtype of economic growth , all the more so that the political