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

This groundbreaking book uncovers how capitalist democracies are adapting to the sweeping forces of deindustrialization, financialization, digitalization, climate change, and the cascading crises of COVID-19, inflation, and geopolitical shocks. Introducing an innovative analytical framework centered on growth and welfare regimes, governmental strategies, and welfare reforms, the authors reveal why national paths are increasingly diverging rather than converging. The book builds on an earlier edited volume on growth and welfare regimes and looks more closely at the new growth trajectories of advanced industrialized countries, the way they shape the strategies of governments, and the impact of those strategies for the welfare state. Through a compelling exploration of seven distinct post-Fordist growth strategies and their associated welfare reform patterns, the book captures the current varieties of welfare capitalism. Anchored by three comparative chapters and ten detailed country studies written by the best specialists of their national cases, it offers a powerful lens to understand the evolving landscape of contemporary political economies and welfare regimes amidst technological, ecological, and global transformations.

About the editor

Bruno Palier is CNRS Research Director at Sciences Po, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics. Trained in social science, he has a PhD in Political science, and is a former student of Ecole Normale Superieure. He co-directed then directed the LIEPP (Laboratory for interdisciplinary Evaluaiton of Public Policies) between October 2014 and July 2020. He works on the comparative political economy of welfare state reforms. He is currently co-leading a project on the world politics of social Investment and another one on Growth and Welfare in Global Capitalism.