Diversity in Contemporary Economic Systems in a Multipolar World: An essay to discuss the future of economic systems
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Keywords:
Economic systems, Market economy, Planned economy, Mixed economy, Regenerative economyAbstract
This essay addresses three main questions concerning economic systems: past, present, and future. In the past, there were three main systems: the market economy, the planned economy, and the mixed economy. Scholars such as Grossman (1974) developed a framework to evaluate economic systems based on efficiency, productivity, and related measures. This framework is still used to classify the economic systems in the multipolar world of the 21st century. Still, the classification is no longer dominated by the Anglo-Saxon world of the USA, the UK and the EU. The world has been changing over the past decades into a multipolar world with large economies like PR China, India, Brazil and the Russian Federation. This has resulted in BRICS, BRICS+ and BRICS++ as a countervailing power to the dominance of the G-7 economies (USA, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, and Canada). Besides the change in the economic power blocks (with Gross Domestic Product or GDP as an important yardstick of economic performance), there are since the LTG or limits to growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972) new schools of thought to measure the performance of an economy: Doughnut economy (Raworth, 2017), GDP as a yardstick (Stiglitz, Sen, & Fitoussi, 2009), Circular economy (Webster, 2017), Six capitals (Gleeson-White, 2014), Prosperity (Jackson, 2017) and Regenerative Economics (Fullerton, 2026). So, the future framework for the classification of economic systems should include at least two additional elements: Multipolarity and Measurement of economic performance with additional Social & Environmental elements.
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