I'd say in Germany, Business and Government own each-other.
It's not uniform throughout the economy but that's basically what it is. Government and Labor leaders sit on company boards.
This helps business understand the needs of government and workers better;
and helps government understand the need of business and labor better.
Small businesses form Business Unions to represent their members interests in government and in big companies.
There's no Minimum Wage in Germany, but virtually all jobs are Union represented jobs - so all jobs pay a living wage. You tip at more expensive restaurants, but waiters are earning $19 an hour or so.
The downside of this system is regulatory oversight can become too co-opted, such as with the recent VW diesel lies. On cozy boards business can become too accomodating to government and government too accommodating to business. As this article says the Boards can become echo chambers. - nytimes.com
The VW Board members from the Wolfsburg and the Schwabian government, the VW labor leaders and Board members from banks and other businesses came to trust what ever CEO Ferdinand Piëch said. He was an engine designer and no one expected he would carry out such a massive fraud at the end of his career, deceiving both the Board, customers and government.
The fraud was first discovered by independent government testing in France and England, but it was all covered up as they received feedback from their automakers that everyone was cheating. The cheaters now include diesel cars made by BMW, Mercedes, GM-Opel, Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Jeep, Citroen, Fiat, and Volvo. - theguardian.com
Only when a University of West Virginia lab obtained a grant from a non-profit to test diesel engines were the discrepancies documented and made public.
So it was all due to money from a little non-profit named the 'International Council on Clean Transportation'. - npr.org
This is 'Business Insider''s review of VW's Supervisory board, which is a subset of the total board which meets less frequently
Ursala and Ferdinand Piëch and Wolfgang Porsche - The extended Piëch and Porsche families own about half of the VW stock
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