Productivity growth and class struggle in a growth regime framework—a proposal for a varieties of productivity regimes approach applied to Germany and the US from 1991 to 2019

Scrutinizing post-Keynesian theory of endogenous technical progress and Régulation Theory’s contributions to analyze institutions, this paper examines productivity growth and its variation within capitalist economies. The aim is to identify how institutions steer productivity growth. Based on the vast literature demonstrating that institutions not only have a direct impact on the innovative environment but also affect productivity growth by changing distribution and demand, an analytical framework that distinguishes between these direct and indirect effects is derived. We call this institutional background that either facilitates or hampers productivity growth the “productivity regime” of the respective economy. Applying this method to Germany and the US from 1991 to 2019, we find that the German economy can be characterized as a labor-led productivity regime, while the US economy shows features of a state-led productivity regime. This could explain the lower level of productivity growth in Germany, where the labor market was partially liberalized in the examined period, compared to the US, where public investment contributed to productivity growth.