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This article revisits the macroeconomic foundations and political economy of national growth models. It argues that the neo-Kaleckian model, which inspired the emergent growth model perspective and focuses primarily on the functional income distribution, can be usefully complemented by theories of private household consumption that focus on the personal distribution of income. The examples of the export-led and debt-led growth models of Germany and the United States, respectively, show how institutional differences help to explain why different countries developed different patterns of income distribution and how income distribution and institutions interacted to generate financial imbalances in different sectors of the economy (i.e., the private household sector, the private corporate sector, and the government sector).

This article proposes a comparative political economy framework for analyzing the links between varieties of capitalism (VoC) and growth models, with a focus on the role of income distribution in the international trade imbalances leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. For a panel of 18 countries over the period 1981–2007, we find that strongly rising top income shares contributed to debt-led growth and current account deficits in major liberal market economies (LMEs), whereas pronounced falls in the wage share contributed to export-led growth and current account surpluses in coordinated market economies (CMEs). We discuss how, against a global trend of liberalization and de-unionization, the institutional features originally thought to establish prosperous (and stable) VoC were linked to the emergence of distinct but similarly inequitable (and unstable) growth models in LMEs and CMEs.

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