Growth Regime Analysis

Growth regime analysis — also called the growth-model perspective — explains national macroeconomic trajectories by the composition of aggregate demand and its link to the distribution of income between wages and profits. Drawing on post-Keynesian theory, codified in Eckhard Hein's 2014 Distribution and Growth after Keynes, the approach asks whether an economy's demand is wage-led or profit-led, and whether its growth is driven by exports, by household consumption (often debt-financed), or by other components. Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson's influential 2016 article recast comparative political economy around this lens, offering the growth-model perspective as a demand-side alternative to the supply-side, firm-centered varieties-of-capitalism tradition. The method reads growth not as the automatic outcome of good institutions but as the result of a particular, politically constructed configuration of demand and distribution.