In this SIWG session, Anke Hassel (Hertie School) will present her forthcoming book on growth strategies during economic transitions, while Leon Küstermann (EUI) will present his research on training policies as a response to structural change in Denmark.
Growth Strategies and Welfare Reforms: How Nations Cope with Economic Transitions (with Bruno Palier)
Speaker: Anke Hassel (Hertie School)
How have advanced capitalist democracies dealt with deindustrialization? Did financialisation 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.
Working With or Against Firms. When are Welfare State Responses to Economic Modernization Effective?
Speaker: Leon Küstermann (EUI)
Governments are increasingly trying to support modernisation losers with labour market training but face the challenge that these social investment responses to technological change, globalisation, and climate change often perpetuate economic (dis)advantage. Therefore, it is central to better understand the institutional determinants for effective social investment since most current initiatives, especially in coordinated market economies, face the dilemma of whether it is worth connecting them to existing (and eventually outdated) corporatist institutions or whether new policies with fewer institutional preconditions should be prioritised. We argue that social investment policies are especially effective when integrated into corporatist institutions. This is because firms are central intermediate actors shaping both people’s experiences with economic modernisation and the functioning of social investment policies. Consequently, it is decisive whether social investment policies coordinate firms around strategies that support vulnerable workers during structural change, which is a comparative advantage of corporatism. We test this argument by showing that the success (and failure) of one the world’s most praised training schemes, the Danish AMU system, depends on its corporatist capacity to coordinate firm behaviour, using full population register data linked to various social surveys.
Please register in order to get a seat and to receive the ZOOM link.