Hetp/2-2016: 27-52 Essays The Social Market Economy as a Feasible Policy Option for Latin Countries Marcelo Resico and Stefano Solari* 1. Social market economy and the German model The different responses of various types of economies to economic policies are an interesting area for researchers, particularly for comparative assessments. In recent times, many countries have experienced dificulties handling rigorous budget constraints and monetary policies that economic consultants have pre- sumed to be beneicial for the German economy in particular and to be essential conditions of prosperity. Such policies are said to have been deeply affected by the ideas of Ordo-liberalism and the soziale Marktwirtschaft (SMW) (Varsori and Poettinger 2014). Therefore, this work studies the extent to which the German style of policy-making can be exported and, preliminarily, what this model is and how deeply it is derived from the SMW model of policy-making. 1 A deep analysis of the German policy-making model would be too ambitious for a paper. The scope of this writing is limited to the history of economic thought and to a synthetic comparative assessment of the policy-making histories of Argentina and Italy, two possible targets of SMW policies. A irst dificulty when discussing German policy-making is that we ind that different political economy approaches have been conceived, planned or un- derstood from various epistemic perspectives. We can see that the literature on this issue encompasses, on one hand, the SMW and Ordo-liberalism and, on the other, the German model or Rhenish capitalism. The former are an expression of a liberal political culture from an ethical perspective, whereas the latter are considered to be more effective analytical frameworks based on ideal types used to characterise the behaviour of the German economy in a comparative setting. The SMW is an economic policy style 2 popularised by Alfred Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard during the irst three decades of German reconstruction. It * UCA, Buenos Aires, marcelo_resico@uca.edu.ar; University of Padua, stefano.solari@unipd.it 1 See also Resico (2015). 2 By the word “style” these scholars intended to avoid the normative status of a speciic economic theory. The exact meaning of “style” is explored in the second section. Copyright © FrancoAngeli N.B: Copia ad uso personale. È vietata la riproduzione (totale o parziale) dell’opera con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata e la sua messa a disposizione di terzi, sia in forma gratuita sia a pagamento.