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This thesis provides a political economy account of how four small open economies – Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Ireland – have coped with the adaptation required by the exogenous pressures of Europeanisation over a period of 25 years. The research is grounded in Polyanian conceptualising of the interaction of States and markets using Varieties of Capitalism as a theoretical foundation. Starting with Katzenstein’s (1985) comparative study as a departure point, the research evaluates how each country responded to deepening EU integration over a four stage periodisation broadly aligned to critical junctures of integration, and closing with the fifth anniversary of the Lehman Bros bank collapse on 15th September, 2013. Particular attention is paid to the Irish case, with a view to resolving the puzzling question of why its ‘Celtic Tiger’ phase of development proved to be unsustainable. The research also identifies the areas where the different Varieties of Capitalism converge and diverge. The findings are that the ‘Democratic Corporatism’ which Katzenstein identified as the means by which small open economies could cope with market forces by balancing them with social compensation, is still intact. Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands have all made necessary reforms to welfare regimes and labour markets without compromising societal values. While having to accommodate to an extent to liberalising forces, they remain developmental states. Ireland exhibited developmentalist characteristics during the 1990s. It caught up with the rest of Europe in a material sense but not in respect of the capabilities required to carry this developmentalism forward to the new millennium. On the contrary, the 2000s saw the country make serious policy errors principally due to an intellectual failure to assimilate the requirements of living in a currency union. Moreover, democratic corporatism in an Irish context was not embedded. It is imperative that Ireland recaptures this developmentalism and repertories of action to help it do so are identified. A number of dilemmas confronting the European integration project are outlined. Foremost among them is the challenge of embarking on a course of deeper integration necessary to consolidate the future of the currency in circumstances where political legitimacy is seriously undermined by austerity. A singular focus on fiscal adjustment has resulted in a deflationary debt crisis which seems set to continue for some time. There is no obvious escape route for Ireland. Indeed the situation is much complicated by its relationship with Britain which is becoming increasingly semi-detached from Europe. Within the policy space available to it, the best course for Ireland is to reinvent itself as a Social Market Economy, as far as possible in the image of its northern European peers. For all the bleakness of the current environment there is opportunity too. The institutional architecture of EMU is so dysfunctional that it must eventually yield to reform if European integration as a project is to survive. Therein lies the possibility for a social democratic revival if a convincing narrative for it can be communicated.

For a number of years teachers in higher education have been encouraged to make use of online learning to transform individual and institutional learning and teaching practices (Crook, 1994; HEFCE, 2005; Laurillard, 1993; Squires, Conole, & Jacobs, 2000). This push to adopt e-learning has been reinforced by political reactions to growing student numbers, falling per capita funding and the growing ominance of bureaucratic university cultures which see e-learning as a means of providing cheaper, more flexible and more scalable delivery of both courses and whole programmes of study.

Analysis of the design of institutions to counteract failures of monetary commitment has largely proceeded in a vacuum. It has ignored similar commitment problems in fiscal policy and in structural adjustment; and it has ignored coordination problems between monetary and fiscal policy. Optimal second-best monetary design will of course depend on the extent to which these other failures can also be solved. The Paper develops a model in which the extent of structural adjustment thus far accomplished influences the ability to raise non-distortionary tax revenue. A poor structural inheritance implies both a low current output, reduced by severe tax distortions, and the need to resort to high levels of the inflation tax. Low output and high inflation both reflect a poor structural inheritance, which can be improved by investing scarce current resources in structural improvements for the future. The chosen rate of adjustment is derived in various regimes. This framework leads naturally to a discussion of the appropriate form of delegated monetary independence, its relation to the ability to make fiscal and adjustment commitments, and the possible role that EMU may play. Clearly, monetary commitment alone cannot accomplish the first best, and might actually make things worse. The analysis offers insights about other forms of external conditionality that might be welfare-improving for transition economies hoping to accede to EMU. The analysis also highlights the danger of believing that a slimline IMF could confine itself to monetary and fiscal policy without worrying about structural adjustment.

An interesting theory of transition must give a convincing account of structural adjustment and supply side improvement. In this paper, I discuss the incentives for government to undertake costly supply side improvement and how these relate to incentives governing the design of monetary and fiscal policy during transition. The government cares about deviations of inflation, output and government spending from their ideal levels, is subject to a budget constraint in which inflation yields some real revenue, and recognizes the distortionary effects of excess levels of taxation. Costly structural adjustment enhances future output by reducing supply side distortions.Within this framework, optimal policies are derived. For a given level of inherited structural capacity, optimal levels of inflation, output and government spending are derived. A poor structural inheritance forces high tax distortions, low output, and heavy reliance on the inflation tax. Hence there is a negative cross-country correlation of output and inflation, because of differences in structural inheritance, even though each country faces a vertical long run Phillips curve. Relative to the first best, failures of monetary precommitment lead to an inflation bias. Joining EMU may improve matters by solving this problem, but may induce two other difficulties: it may reduce the inflation tax too much, and it may lead to stabilization of the wrong shocks. It need not be welfare enhancing.The incentive for structural adjustment is then examined. Compared with the first best speed of adjustment, a failure of monetary discretion, by raising distortions, increases the marginal benefit of reform and induces more rapid adjustment. If transition economies willingly enter EMU, their distortions are reduced and in consequence they will reform more slowly. Since this seems at variance with current perceptions, the paper then introduces two further failures, namely in fiscal commitment and in commitment to reform itself. It is shown that these can interact to make complete stagnation of reform the optimal policy conditional on the failures remaining. In those circumstances, EMU membership, or even its prospect, may be a powerful force for speeding up the pace of reform in countries that otherwise would have stagnated.