³We excluded from this classification smaller countries (like Cyprus, Luxembourg, or Malta) because their institutional model is not clearly positioned according to the literature. For instance, it is not clear if Cyprus should be considered as a case of the liberal variety of capitalism, or mixed/Mediterranean. Likewise, the disproportionate levels of labour productivity exhibited by Luxembourg, probably due to its peculiar economic structure (e.g. international finance), prompted the exclusion of this country from the classification. Furthermore, almost all of the countries corresponding to the central or eastern part of Europe (following the United Nations’s scheme) were not included in any bloc as most of them would correspond to the post-communist variety of capitalism. In this residual bloc, we also included the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) because these countries, despite the fact that they are part of the natural geographic region of North Europe (Figure 1), are – in our opinion – closer to the post-communist bloc, due to their history, culture, and economy, as also corroborated by their medium-low average levels of labour productivity (see Table 1).