Introduction: The politics of growth, stagnation, and upgrading in peripheral advanced economies

Comparative Political Economy (CPE) has traditionally paid limited attention to growth trajectories outside the core economies of Northern Europe and the United States—a pattern that persists in the current Growth Models (GMs) debate. This special issue seeks to broaden the geographical, theoretical, and empirical scope of CPE by integrating the concept of peripherality into discussions of GMs. Drawing on insights from Latin American structuralism, dependency theory, and GMs theory, the contributions in this issue address two interrelated dimensions of capitalist development in advanced peripheral economies, which we develop in this introduction: peripheral structure and peripheral agency. By examining the complex interactions between core and peripheral economies, this issue uncovers diverse patterns of peripheral capitalist development and calls for a deeper engagement with peripherality within CPE.