Growth Strategies and Welfare Reforms: How Nations Cope with Economic Transitions

How have advanced capitalist democracies dealt with deindustrialization? Did financialization affect these economies to the same degree? How does digitalization transform them? How do governments deal with the polycrises of Covid-19, inflation, and climate change? What roles did welfare systems and reforms play in these adaptations?

This book seeks to answer these questions by exploring the economic and social trajectories of advanced political economies in Europe, the United States, China, and Russia in the twenty-first century. It focuses on the interaction between national growth and welfare regimes, government growth strategies, and welfare state reforms to explain these countries’ differing developments from the 1990s to the mid 2020s. The chapters offer theoretical, typological, and empirical comparisons between advanced capitalist countries, alongside detailed national case studies, in order to further understand their general economic and social features and their developments.

Growth Strategies and Welfare Reforms features contributions from leading scholars in comparative political economy and comparative welfare state research, and presents a sophisticated theoretical approach, drawing on but also moving beyond varieties of capitalism and growth model approaches.

Anke Hassel, Professor of Public Policy, Hertie School, Bruno Palier, CNRS Research Director, Political Science Department, Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes

Anke Hassel is Professor of Public Policy at the Hertie School. From 2016 to 2019 she was the Scientific Director of the WSI at the Hans Böckler Foundation. Anke Hassel has extensive international experience and scientific expertise in the fields of the labour market, social partnership, codetermination, and the comparative political economy of developed industrial nations. She was an expert in the fact-finding committee on growth, prosperity and quality of life in the German Bundestag (2012-13); the expert commission on the future of the Hans Böckler Foundation (2015-17) and chairwoman of the expert group on Workers’ Voice and Good Corporate Governance in Transnational Companies in Europe (2015-2018). She is the co-editor of Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies (with Bruno Palier; OUP 2021) and How to Do Public Policy (with Kai Wegrich; OUP 2022)

Bruno Palier is CNRS Research Director at Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes. He was trained in social science and has a PhD in Political Science. His research explores welfare state reforms around the world. He was director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP) between 2014 and 2020. He is the co-editor of the two volumes of The World Politics of Social Investment (with Julian Garritzmann and Silja Häusermann; OUP 2022) and Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies (with Anke Hassel; OUP 2021).