Different countries or regions of the world have recently attempted to define a “growth strategy”, aimed at stimulating economic growth and job creation, in which social protection plays a more or less pronounced role. Research in political economy has shown that it is possible to establish consistent patterns between the structures of the economy, economic policies, employment policies, skill formation schemes and social protection systems. However, all these approaches identify types or regimes; they are often too static and too abstract to understand recent developments of economic restructuring, when national political economies face deindustrialization, the new digital service economy and/or financialization.

The aim of this mini-symposium is to identify different national growth strategies, i.e. the general common orientation given to economic policies (and social protection reforms) in a specific country, in order to recover growth and create jobs in a period of deindustrialization (since the late 1970s). We assume that, when analysing the interaction between growth strategies and welfare state reforms, we can identify distinct patterns that are influenced by national production regimes and national social policy regimes. The dominant social institutional arrangements of a country interact with its production regime, leading to specific types of economic specialization. Careful institutional analysis reveals that even between countries sharing similar production and welfare regimes, national economic strategies differ. In order to understand these dynamics, we focus on the way various economic and social actors have tried to establish a specific compromise around their different economic and social interests.