Extending Varieties of Capitalism to Emerging Economies: What can We Learn from Brazil?

In this paper we argue that efforts to apply Varieties of Capitalism to emerging economies can retaining a central role for institutions as constraining, it is important to incorporate into the analysis the nature and role of social blocs and the development of growth regimes. The paper develops a framework that systematically explores the links and interactions between institutions, the politics of social blocs and the viability of growth regimes as a way of understanding the trajectory of varieties of capitalism. We illustrate the value of this framework by applying it to developments in Brazil over the last three decades. In our concluding section, we describe how the application of the framework can be broadened not just to other emerging economies but also to the challenges currently being faced by advanced capitalist democracies. We identify a series of research questions developing and applying insights from this framework. A theoretically renewed comparative capitalisms approach to emerging economies is therefore potentially going to provide a payoff to developing a global perspective on forms of capitalism and their trajectories.