EU-12 Countries In The Context Of European Social Model Types

Abstract

The European social model is a vision of society that combines sustainable economic development with ever-improving living and working conditions. The issue whether or not it is possible to use one so-called European social model in the European Union countries, including in new member states and what it should be like, has been a topic of debates for a long time already. In reality, there are several different social models used in Europe, which interpret the concepts of efficiency and equality differently. The theoretical part of this paper will discuss the European social model and its typology based on research by various authors. We shall compare the social outputs of countries grouped into different model types on the basis of different socio-economic indicators. In the empirical part, we carry out a cluster analysis for positioning new European Union (EU-12) countries into mix of European social models. We concentrate on two of the most important aspects of social systems - monetary poverty/inequality and public policy - and try to classify European Union countries according to their social policy. In the analysis, we also evaluate whether the distribution of EU-15 countries, on the basis of Esping-Andersen’s typology, is the same today after a major enlargement of the European Union. We use different clustering methods such as hierarchical and k-means clustering. The analysis is based on EUROSTAT data; clusters are formed on the basis of 2008 socio-economic indicators for EU-27 countries.