A framework for testing the macroeconomic architecture of cooperativism

This article presents a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis and testing of macroeconomic architectures. It is based on the premise that the persistent divergence between the rate of return on capital (r) and the rate of economic growth (g) is not merely an ex post distributive phenomenon, but reflects deeper institutional configurations of economic systems. On this basis, the article extends existing approaches to macroeconomic modelling toward an integrated framework that captures the interconnections among financial architecture, distributive mechanisms, and the structure of economic power. The analysis includes the identification of key blind spots in contemporary economics and proposes their systematic resolution. The proposed framework combines four analytical modules: a stock-flow consistent (SFC) framework ensuring macroeconomic consistency, agent-based modelling (ABM) capturing microeconomic interactions, a module of financial and digital resilience, and a behavioural analysis of the concentration of interpretive power. This synthesis enables the ex ante identification of mechanisms through which institutions shape the dynamics of capital accumulation. As an illustrative application, the framework is applied to the model of cooperativism, whose key components have been developed in previous research. The results suggest that an increase in the level of macroeconomic democracy—defined as a composite parameter encompassing wealth distribution, the role of inheritance, participation in firm governance, and the functioning of market mechanisms—is associated with a decline in the rentier component of returns on capital and a simultaneous increase in productivity. Within this framework, the difference between r and g appears as a decreasing function of an institutional parameter, indicating the existence of threshold conditions for wealth convergence. The proposed approach thus provides an analytical tool for the comparative study of macroeconomic architectures and their impact on long-term stability and the distributive dynamics of economic systems.