Equality of opportunity in Italian university education: is there any role for social welfare spending?

ABSTRACTThe theories and evidence about relationships between democracy and social spending in Latin America are highly contested. A recent study shows that collective protest by organized labor effectively increases social security and welfare spending, whereas mass protest does not have comparable effects on human capital spending in Latin American democracies. This article reexamines the analysis and demonstrates that organized labor alone cannot sway democratic governments. Labor strikes require the synchronizing effect of mass protest to obtain government concessions. Only through concurrent episodes of mass protest can organized labor overcome the numerical disadvantage of pressing democratic government for social welfare spending. In understanding the relationship between labor protests and social welfare spending through the lens of insider-outsider dichotomy, it is critical to consider the synchronizing effect of mass protests. The findings remain robust with alternative measures of democracy and various model specifications.

ObjectivesTo assess the effect of social spending on population health.DesignMultivariate regression analysis was performed to investigate the relationship between age-standardised cause-specific mortality rates and social spending. Mortality data were collected...

Neither fiscal federalism nor austerity theory adequately explain shifts in US local government expenditure after the Great Recession. We assess spatial differences in local government expenditure composition using finance data for all local governments in the USA from 2007 to 2017. Overall, there was considerable stability in local expenditure patterns, despite pressures generated by the Great Recession. State decentralization, state aid, politics, local capacity, and need all affect local expenditure patterns. Panel regressions of education, social, and allocational expenditures show decentralization is associated with more redistributive expenditure at the local level—not less, as fiscal federalism and austerity theory claim. However, decentralization of educational expenditure is associated with less local educational expenditure. State aid, by contrast, has a complementary effect on local education expenditure. Education spending dropped and then recovered, but state educational aid was found to privilege suburbs. Social expenditure grew during the Great Recession as most cities and counties maintained social welfare expenditures even in the face of fiscal constraints. Overall state aid for social welfare relieved local social expenditure, but it had a complementary effect on social welfare spending in states with historically high social welfare commitments (NY, CA, the Midwest). Localities in the Midwest faced greater fiscal stress, as state aid for social welfare plummeted in these states during the Great Recession. Despite the austerity faced by Midwestern counties, they maintained redistributive expenditure levels. US local governments are not austerity machines. They practice pragmatic municipalism—meeting needs despite limited fiscal resources.

The present analysis is part of an ongoing study of the determinants, structure, and consequences of the U.S. welfare state. In this paper, we explore the bifurcated structure of U.S. social welfare spending, the differential growth of “social consumption” and “social expense” outlays, and the redistributional impact of these expenditures on quintile shares of personal income. Results of a time-series regression analysis (1949–1977) indicate that, in relative terms, social welfare expenditures have not been progressively redistributive.

Globalization is often credited with the expansion of the welfare state and increased spending on social insurance programs. However, empirical evidence on the relationship between globalization and social welfare spending is mixed. One possible explanation for these mixed results might be country-specific factors that mediate the effect of globalization on social spending, such as key characteristics of a country's labor market. Countries with fluid, flexible labor markets likely respond to globalization differently than countries with rigid, inflexible markets. At the micro level, workers who find it costly to adjust to market volatility will likely demand compensatory and insurance programs to offset the high costs of adjustment. Given this, the relationship between globalization and social insurance is likely to be more sharply positive among countries with relatively immobile labor. I test this argument using data on social expenditures in both developed and developing countries. The findings indicate that trade exposure increases social spending in countries where workers face high adjustment costs. When workers face low adjustment costs, trade exposure has a strong reductive effect on social spending. This reductive effect declines as adjustment costs increase.

Income inequality is critical to social justice, and in this context, social spending is seen as one of the main policy tools for ensuring equality in income distribution. This research focuses on the relationship between social spending and income inequality. It also examines the development of social security systems, the organization and objectives of various social security frameworks, and social security spending in different countries. In this context, the study aimed to examine the impact of social security expenditures on the Gini coefficient. The study compared various selected EU countries and Türkiye in terms of these expenditures. The study was conducted using Generalized Estimation Equations method. Data was obtained from reliable sources such as the World Bank, and the OECD. The Gini coefficient was used as an indicator of income inequality, and the share of public expenditures in gross domestic product was used as the independent variable. Control variables included direct tax rates, unemployment rates, per capita income, and inflation. The findings of the analysis reveal a significant relationship between social security expenditures and the Gini coefficient. In this context, the findings are consistent with the literature and indicate that social expenditures are a fiscal policy tool that has a welfare-enhancing effect on disadvantaged segments of society.

Many countries struggle with the question of appropriate social welfare spending. Here we test several hypotheses about the dynamics between social welfare spending and crime. We do so using pooled, cross-national time-series data. Our findings suggest that per capita social welfare spending is associated with lower rates of both theft and homicide. Time lagged analysis suggests that the current level of social welfare spending, not that of recent years, accounts for any possible suppression of crime. The data also suggest that, whereas high homicide rates do not appear to inspire increased social welfare generosity, lagged measures of theft rates are associated with subsequent increases in social welfare spending among high theft countries.

Issue ownership theory posits that when social welfare is electorally salient, left-wing parties gain public support by rhetorically emphasizing social welfare issues. There is less research, however, on whether left-wing governing parties benefit from increasing social welfare spending. That is, it is not known whether leftist governments gain from acting on the issues they rhetorically emphasize. This article presents arguments that voters will not react to governments’ social welfare rhetoric, and reviews the conflicting arguments about how government support responds to social welfare spending. It then reports time-series, cross-sectional analyses of data on government support, governments’ social welfare rhetoric and social welfare spending from Britain, Spain and the United States, that support the prediction that government rhetoric has no effects. The article estimates, however, that increased social welfare spending sharply depresses support for both left- and right-wing governments. These findings highlight a strategic dilemma for left-wing governments, which lose public support when they act on their social welfare rhetoric by increasing welfare spending.

A major question of political economy is why and under what conditions welfare state expansion and retrenchment takes place. We examine the impact of the Great Recession of 2008–2009 on welfare policies of the American states. The analysis examines social policy spending in the American States for periods ranging from 1982 to 2011. The results suggest that social welfare spending is higher with better economic conditions in general but also with higher poverty rates. Liberal citizens and governments and Democratic majorities in the state house produce higher welfare spending. There is a trade-off between education and social welfare spending. Controlling for political, social, and economic conditions that affect state welfare policy, the years of the Great Recession saw a contraction of spending on social welfare programs in general and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families in particular, but an expansion of support for Medicaid.

The volatility impact of social expenditure’s cyclicality in advanced economies

This chapter presents a multivariate time-series analysis of social welfare spending that compares Greece, Portugal, and Spain with other OECD countries, between the years 1960 and 1990. Included in this analysis are factors commonly found to affect social spending (e.g., per capita wealth and population age). These contributed to low levels of social spending in these three countries, but are insufficient to explain lagging program development. Three different measures of democratization, however, produce strong evidence that the authoritarian regimes of Spain and Portugal had seriously retarded program development, while the short duration of the “colonels' regime” in Greece had less of an impact. Indeed, the type of transition to democracy had a discernible impact on policy change: the Portuguese revolution was accompanied by immediate increases in social welfare spending; while the more gradual transition in Spain led to incremental policy change. In all three, democratization has allowed social welfare policies to converge on typical OECD levels over the following two decades.

This study aimed to explore the role of community-level social welfare expenditures in depressive symptoms among older adults in Korea, with a particular focus on living arrangements. Multi-level data-comprising individual-level data from the 2019 Community Health Survey and regional-level data from the Korean Statistical Information Service-were analyzed using multi-level ordered logistic regression. The dependent variable was the severity of depressive symptoms as measured by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 score, and the primary independent variables were per capita social welfare expenditure, living arrangements, and their cross-level interaction term. Older adults living alone exhibited more severe depressive symptoms compared to those living with others (odds ratio [OR], 1.22; p=0.006). Higher community social welfare expenditure was significantly associated with reduced depressive symptom severity (OR, 0.73; p=0.019). Moreover, the protective effect of social welfare expenditure was more pronounced among older adults living alone than among those not living alone (OR, 0.92; p=0.046). Social welfare expenditure was highly correlated with social cohesion, which weakened its independent association with depressive symptoms. This study highlights the potential of community-level social welfare expenditure to mitigate depressive symptoms among older adults, particularly those who live alone. In light of the rising number of older adults living alone, these findings suggest that non-medical interventions, such as enhanced social welfare programs, may help alleviate depression in this vulnerable population. The strong positive correlation between social welfare expenditure and social cohesion also raises further research questions regarding their interrelationship.

Previous research identifies the effects of immigration on social welfare from different perspectives. However, existing studies have not thoroughly explored how political institutions shape the nexus between immigration and the welfare state. This study argues that the types of government condition immigration's welfare effects. By restraining the policy influence of anti‐immigration sentiment and sharing the responsibility for expanded welfare spending across the government as a whole, coalition and minority governments tend to spend more on welfare when facing increased immigration than single‐party majority governments. Using time‐series cross‐sectional data between 1980 and 2019 from 28 advanced countries, this study finds that the increase in immigration inflow has an ambiguous relationship to social welfare expenditures. However, this relationship is substantially influenced by government types. Immigration under coalition and minority governments has a larger positive effect on welfare spending than under single‐party majority governments.

I. Introduction THERE was a time, not so long ago, when the welfare state was viewed as a proud social accomplishment. But recently it has been under considerable attack. At the heart of this attack has been the claim that during its heyday, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the social benefit expenditures of the welfare state led to subsequent economic stagnation and persistent unemployment throughout the advanced world. This paper brings to bear the empirical evidence from a multicountry set of studies. I outline the issues involved, discuss the methodology behind the empirical studies of six major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and present the main findings. My central finding is that social benefit expenditures were financed out of the taxes paid by recipients of these very expenditures: in other words, by and large, social welfare expenditures were self-financed, and could not have been a source of fiscal deficits or a drag on growth. 1. The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State The growth of welfare states is one of the characteristic features of modern capitalist democracies. European welfare SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Who Pays for the “Welfare” in the Welfare State? A Multicountry Study ANWAR SHAIKH states began with pension and social insurance programs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then grew into comprehensive systems of social support between the 1930s and the 1950s. In the United States, it took the Great Depression to spark similar initiatives in the form of New Deal programs on social security, state-based unemployment insurance , and limited federally subsidized public assistance (which Americans call “welfare”) for the elderly poor, dependent children , and the blind. After World War II, the role of the state expanded rapidly. From 1960 to 1988, in the OECD countries the average government share in gross domestic product (GDP) rose by over onehalf (from 27 percent to 42 percent), while the average government share in total employment rose by about two-thirds (from 11 percent to 18 percent). Alongside this came a shift in the types of government spending, away from traditional expenditures on defense, public administration, and general economic services and toward social welfare expenditures on health, education , and transfer payments (social security and social assistance payments, business subsidies, and interest on government debt). By the 1980s, transfer payments had become the single largest category of economic expenditure in most countries (OECD, 1985: 16). But the rise in government expenditure was only one side of the story. Taxes also rose sharply, and their composition shifted from traditional sources, such as indirect business taxes, to social security and personal income taxes (OECD, 1985: 16-17). Thus on the whole, both government expenditures and the tax structure changed in very similar ways. The early part of the postwar period was the zenith of the welfare state as the industrialized world grew at a rate of almost 5 percent annually. However, by the mid-1970s the long underlying expansion had peaked and by the late-1970s the average growth rate of the industrialized world had fallen to half its previous level. By 1983, the OECD countries as a whole were barely grow532 SOCIAL RESEARCH ing (OECD, 1991). In this period of growth slowdown and eventual stagnation came rising unemployment and poverty, which led to greater demands on social expenditures. In the United States, the postwar boom peaked in 1968-1969. The economy moved into a phase of (initially inflationary) stagnation . A major change took place in all major economic patterns at this point. In the boom decades from 1947 to 1968, growth was strong, unemployment averaged 4.8 percent, real wages grew almost 50 percent, and the average annual federal budget deficit was a mere $1.7 billion.1 In the subsequent two decades between 1969 and 1989, unemployment rose to an average of 6.6 percent, real wages declined by 14 percent, and the average budget deficit rose almost fiftyfold to $82.4 billion (ERP, 1996). By 1980, eligibility for public assistance had been restricted, and for those who did receive aid, real benefits were 20 percent...

This article analyzes the relationship between collective protest and social spending in Latin America from 1970 to 2007. I argue that under democracy, organized labor is in a better position relative to other groups in society to obtain social policy concessions as a consequence of their collective action efforts. Labor insiders mobilize around specific demands, and labor strikes carry significant economic and political costs on governments. In contrast, other groups in society rarely protest around specific social policy issues and are more often subject to successful demobilization tactics from political leaders. Results from an error correction model (ECM) show that in democracies, collective protest has differentiated effects on social spending. While strikes have a strong positive long-term effect on social security and welfare spending, none of the different forms of collective protest affect education or health spending. Importantly, I also find evidence of a deterrent effect of mass protests in democratic regimes; cutbacks in human capital spending are less likely as peaceful large-scale demonstrations increase.