Government and Business Ethics

Since the collapse of Communism there has been a dramatic change in the relationship between intellectual opinion and the market. The well-established errors of central planning and the spread of market methods of resource allocation throughout the world have brought about a new type of social and economic criticism of capitalism. Although the price system reigns supreme it is now argued that there are different types of capitalism and that we should not assume that the familiar Anglo-American model is either uniquely efficient or, in a moral sense, the most pleasing. We are now told’ that there are competing types of capitalism and, although they all depend to a great extent on competition, private property and the signals of the market to allocate resources, the way these institutional arrangements are organised indicates differing social forms. Thus we have, amongst other phenomena, the ‘social market economy’ (which originated in postwar West Germany), East Asian capitalism, ‘stakeholder’ capitalism, and the various types of socially concerned market theories that derive from American business ethics.