Том 2 - Тенденции и предизвикателства в развитието на ...

While case studies reveal specific features in economic and socialinstitutions in individual countries, we can identify common drivingforces of motivation in the countries classified under each model. Theyare not only self-sustaining but also self-proliferating.We will not discuss here in details the salient features of each model.It is worth to outline just some of their core characteristics as regardthe current European crisis and the opportunities of our social future.Differences among successful, as well as less successful modelsboth persist and change over time.For instance, the guided market economy produced the Japaneseand the French economic miracles in the second half of the 20 th centurywhen manufacturing was the leading sector in the economy, but the modelcame into contradiction to the main trends of economic developmentduring the last two decades. Thus, we should not be surprised by the outspelled crisis in Greece, Spain and Portugal. Another salient feature ofthe guided market economy, which contributed to the current crisis inpublic finance and in the social welfare system, is derived from its “nonsocialnature”. The priority on resource allocation has shifted aside problemsof equity, social safety nets, etc. Thus, every piece of socialachievement has been achieved through usually desperate social struggle.As a result, welfare institutions have not been immanently incorporatedinto the model structures, but rather “attached” and often confronting itshomeostasis. Until the current economic slowdown economic growth hasbeen sustained sufficiently to finance the rising costs of providing socialachievement. When growth alone has proved inadequate, guided marketeconomies have run up debts to pay for social security, and as a resulttheir welfare systems failed to handle the crisis in this domain.The Europe 2020 Strategy “sets out a vision of Europe’s socialmarket economy for the 21 st century”. Even though the current crisis hasrevealed a number of deficiencies in the social market economies andsome of their social commitments will have to be reconsidered, the modelstill demonstrates flexibility and adequacy to the current technologicalrevolution.As compared to the guided market economies, the social marketeconomies demonstrate the best performance among the EU member101