Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation

"The Global Financial Crisis and the following period of 'secular stagnation' have raised questions about the state of modern economics and macroeconomics in particular. This has had repercussions for social sciences that deal with economic issues. In particular in the fields of International Political Economy (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy (CPE) there is rising interest in non-mainstream macroeconomic theories (Blyth and Matthijs 2017, Baccaro and Pontussen 2016). In CPE there is a recognition that the field has in the past decades increasingly shifted to institutional and microeconomic questions and disregarded Keynesian considerations of macroeconomic instability and problems of fallacies of composition (Schwartz and Tranoy 2019). The purposeof this chapter is to give an overview of post-Keynesian economics (PKE) as a non-mainstream macroeconomic theory"--
A set of state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level that work from a new theoretical framework that analyzes the politics of growth and stagnation. As highlighted by the recent debate on 'secular stagnation,' economic growth has slowed down considerably, and this has given rise to a host of new problems, from financial instability to the collapse of mainstream parties. What happens when growth—the main mechanism of capitalist legitimation—isharder to come by and less broadly shared? And how should we think about capitalist diversity in the context of global stagnation? In Diminishing Returns, Lucio Baccaro, Mark Blyth, and Jonas Pontusson address these questions by bringing together a number of comparative and international political economists with expertise across many different countries and regions. Going beyond the methodological nationalism common in mostcomparative research, each author departs from a common theoretical framework, the Growth Model Perspective, and contributes to develop it further. The outcome is a new theoretical framework to help social scientists, policymakers, and opinion makers, understand the politics of growth andstagnation, which offers state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level.