"One of the main challenges of sustainable welfare is to design welfare systems that are “growth resilient” or independent of economic growth. When the sustainable welfare literature discusses the relationship between welfare states and economic growth, it mostly focuses on the growth dependency of welfare states. This is undoubtedly an important component. However, I argue in this contribution that the relationship between welfare states and growth is bidirectional. Hence, it is equally important to understand the various roles that welfare states can play for economic growth, as some of the earlier welfare state literature has argued. Welfare states and growth can influence each other in both negative and positive ways depending on the context and on the time horizon that one focuses on. Designing sustainable welfare systems will only be possible if we acknowledge the mutual and complex dependencies between welfare states and economic growth and if we seek to reduce the mutual dependencies between them."

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