Growth Strategies and Welfare Reforms

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.