Exploring pandemic-specific welfare regimes typology: Impacts on social problems during COVID-19

Recently income inequality has been growing in many countries, and it is one of the biggest economic and social problems. The International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and other organizations stress the importance of this issue. According to Atkinson, Brandolini (2009), changes in income inequality show whether a particular society becomes more egalitarian over time or not, in which socio-economic direction it progresses.Even countries with similar economic structures differ in the level of income inequality and, according to Stiglitz (2015), differences in income inequality are related to policy decisions. The decisions of countries may depend on the prevailing view if markets are efficient or inefficient. In the first case, countries tend to rely more on neoliberal economic doctrine, and in the second, on the welfare state, where the role of government is more active (Stiglitz, 2017). However, it is observed that the growing income inequality is related to the growing role of the financial market, i.e. the phenomenon of financialization, which weakens the role of government. Thus, assessing the impact of financialization on income inequality is an actual topic of scientific debate.The results of studies, assessing the impact of financialization on income inequality, are mixed. Some financialization dimensions, such as financial liberalization, banking / financial crises increase income inequality, but microfinance intensity reduces income inequality. The contradictory results can be explained by the fact that research samples differ, various indicators reflecting the financialization are used, different independent variables are included in the regression equations.Studies have also been conducted in groups of countries that belong to different welfare state regimes (Josifidis, Mitrović, Supić, Glavaški, 2016; Dafermos, Papatheodorou, 2013). These studies emphasize that the level of income inequality is related to the efficiency of the social security system, i.e. income inequality is lower in Social–democratic welfare state regime (inherent universal social services and benefits) and Conservative–corporatist welfare state regime (social security model related to employment status) groups of countries than in the Mediterranean welfare state regime (characterized by the fragmentation of the social security model) and Liberal welfare state regime (inherent the specificity of the social security model, there is no universality) groups of countries. However, there is a lack of research that assesses the impact of financialization on income inequality in different welfare state regime groups of countries. The research problem: what is the impact of financialization on income inequality, is this impact the same in different EU welfare state regime groups? The object of the research - the impact of financialization on income inequality. The aim of the research is to assess the impact of financialization on income inequality in EU country groups.Research methods: analysis of scientific literature, grouping, generalization, regression analysis of panel data.When assessing the impact of financialization on income inequality in different welfare regimes EU country groups during the period 1998-2017, the least-squares regression analysis method of the panel data was used. The conducted research confirms the hypothesis and clearly shows that financialization, measured both by financial development index and domestic credit to the private sector, increases income inequality in all groups of countries. Thus, it shows that the role of the financial market is growing and financialization processes are contributing to the growth of income inequality in all groups of welfare regime countries and may reduce the role of government. These results are in line with Stiglitz, 2012; Razgūnė, 2017; Dünhaupt, 2014; Golebiowski, Szczepankowski, Wisniewska, 2016; Palley, 2008) who analyzed the relationship between financialization and growing income inequality. However, the study of Dabla-Norris et al. (2015), by contrast, find that the ratio of domestic credit to GDP in developed countries reduces income inequality.

New spatial econometric techniques and applications in regional science

Background: whether socioeconomic position over the life course influences the wellbeing of older people similarly in different societies is not known.Objective: to investigate the magnitude of socioeconomic inequalities in life satisfaction among individuals in early old age and the influence of the welfare state regime on the associations.Design: comparative study using data from Wave 2 and SHARELIFE, the retrospective Wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), collected during 2006–07 and 2008–09, respectively.Setting: thirteen European countries representing four welfare regimes (Southern, Scandinavian, Post-communist and Bismarckian).Subjects: a total of 17,697 individuals aged 50–75 years.Methods: slope indices of inequality (SIIs) were calculated for the association between life course socioeconomic position (measured by the number of books in childhood, education level and current wealth) and life satisfaction. Single level linear regression models stratified by welfare regime and multilevel regression models, containing interaction terms between socioeconomic position and welfare regime type, were calculated.Results: socioeconomic inequalities in life satisfaction were present in all welfare regimes. Educational inequalities in life satisfaction were narrowest in Scandinavian and Bismarckian regimes among both genders. Post-communist and Southern countries experienced both lower life satisfaction and larger socioeconomic inequalities in life satisfaction, using most measures of socioeconomic position. Current wealth was associated with large inequalities in life satisfaction across all regimes.Conclusions: Scandinavian and Bismarckian countries exhibited narrower socioeconomic inequalities in life satisfaction. This suggests that more generous welfare states help to produce a more equitable distribution of wellbeing among older people.

Welfare Theory and Development

PurposeThis paper takes an ideal type of different welfare regimes as a starting point. It investigates with survey data people's experiences and expectations towards the welfare state and its functioning against various social risks. The paper discusses questions like, are there differences in perceptions between welfare regimes? And what is the role of the welfare state regime in explaining those differences?Design/methodology/approachThis research article is based on OECD survey data and classical welfare state classifications. The analysis of welfare regimes provides both a theoretical and methodological structure for study. The study-applied analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) to test a hypothesis that regimes matter analyses more nuanced aspects of current and prospects to the near future welfare state provision.FindingsThis examination suggests that welfare regimes still matter even though the differences in averages were not as immense as expected. Perceptions in different welfare regimes also have priorities related to the willingness to pay more taxes in order to receive better access to services and financial support if needed. In Nordic countries, the acute priority based on survey data is investment in education and re-training. In Continental Europe, more financial support is needed for pensions. Overall, respondents representing emerging Eastern European and Mediterranean welfare regimes think that welfare provision should be financed more compared to other welfare regime respondents. Health is a universal and unifying issue, particularly in ageing welfare states, and brings health as a traditional and central question again.Originality/valueRespondents' perceptions work as people's voice and assessments are used to gain a contemporary understanding of welfare and about welfare state functioning.

The paper contributes to the welfare state regime literature by assessing the existence of the East-Central European welfare state regime. The article empirically tests whether East-Central European countries constitute a distinct welfare regime or they can be classified into existing regimes by using hierarchical cluster analysis. The paper defines clusters for two distinct time periods, in order to shed light on the changes over time. The research provides two substantive contributions. First, welfare states in East-Central Europe constitute a distinct welfare state regime only for the period of 2014-2016, and they might be subdivided into two groups: (1) Visegrad countries and (2) Balkan and Baltic countries together. Second, countries within the East-Central European welfare regime has become more similar over time.

There is evidence that young people are less satisfied with their lives when they are unemployed or working in precarious conditions. This study aims to shed light on how the life satisfaction of unemployed and precariously employed young people varies across welfare states with different labour market policies and levels of social protection. The analyses are based on representative cross-sectional survey data from five European countries (Denmark, the UK, Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic), corresponding to five different welfare state regimes. For economically active young adults ( N=6681), the prevalence ratios of low life satisfaction were estimated through multivariate logistic regressions. In all five countries, unemployed young adults presented a higher prevalence of low life satisfaction. When we compared employees with people with permanent and temporary contracts, the former were more satisfied with their lives only in Germany and the UK, examples of conservative and liberal welfare regimes, respectively. Experience of unemployment decreased young adults' life satisfaction only in Germany and the Czech Republic, examples of a conservative and an eastern European welfare regime, respectively. In almost all countries, young adults with low economic self-sufficiency presented a higher prevalence of low life satisfaction. There are nuanced patterns of employment type and life satisfaction across European states that hint at welfare state regimes as possible moderators in this relationship. The results suggest that the psychological burdens of unemployment or work uncertainty cannot be overlooked and should be addressed according to different types of social provisions.

This chapter examines the contested concepts of gender, citizenship and welfare state regimes as they relate to one another in the literature analysing redistribution and social service production and provision over the past couple of decades. The analysis unfolds from the centrality of citizenship rights, especially social rights, in welfare state development to a discussion of the gendered analysis of citizenship as rights and citizenship as obligation traditions. It argues that they are complementary and that both are essential to a realistic and effective analysis of welfare states in terms of the quality of social rights and the bases of stratification on which they are structured. The gender-sensitive critique of citizenship and welfare state regimes points to the pivotal role of the family in the state, market, family triadic division of responsibility for services and benefits, in the reconciliation of labour market participation and the care of dependent people in contemporary welfare states. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the second part of the title, which summarizes two perspectives on the current policy context within which gender, citizenship and welfare regimes are discussed. The contrasting messages of an ‘incomplete revolution’ in relation to women’s roles and the ‘loss in translation’ of gender egalitarian strategies into the gender awareness reflect some of the key issues considered in this chapter. It concludes that gender, citizenship and welfare state regimes continue to be contested concepts but they are now the subject of intense theoretical and empirical analysis that is yielding significant insights into the comparative analysis of welfare states, in particular the variation in the range and quality of social rights. Not only do welfare state regimes differ in the primacy they accord to the state, the market and the family, a particular welfare state may differ in the primacy accorded across particular policy areas.

Thinking in terms of “regimes” and “regime types” has become popular in comparative welfare research since the late 1980s. Originally stemming from international relations studies (Krasner 1983), the “regime” concept has been discovered for and adapted to welfare state research mainly by Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping‐Andersen, who used it in his seminal work on The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) to characterize the institutional nexus of work and welfare in advanced capitalist societies. Building on a welfare regime's capacity to reduce the market dependency of individuals (“decommodification”), its implications for the structure of social inequality (“stratification”), and the relative importance of state, market, and the family (or households) in the production of social welfare, Esping‐Andersen claimed that the modern welfare state comes in three ideal typical variants: the “liberal,” the “conservative,” and the “social democratic” model. The great advance for welfare research brought about by this regime typology is twofold. On the one hand, the “three worlds” constitute a suitable tool for bringing order into the complex “real world” of welfare capitalism. On the other hand, and when it comes to specify the differences between advanced welfare states, the concept of welfare regimes focuses not simply on social expenditure data but on the qualitative aspects of welfare state policies, i.e., on the welfare state's relevance as a means of ordering social relations according to specific ideological convictions and normative principles. According to Esping‐Andersen, the relative weight of “liberal,” “conservative,” and/or “social democratic” convictions and principles in different national welfare regimes today depends on the power resources with which the respective social movements were able to engage in the “democratic class struggle” (Korpi 1983) around the welfare state, its emergence and its design, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Despite the majority of Nepalese children struggling to meet basic needs there have been negligible attempts to examine the effectiveness of social policies for children in Nepal. Equally challenging is the use of inappropriate frameworks, primarily the UN-Child Rights Convention (UNCRC), the development approach, and a non-hierarchical notion of child well-being (CWB) to conceptualise such policies. This calls for alternate approaches such as welfare state frameworks (WSF) while formulating such policies. But despite the usefulness of WSF in combating absolute child poverty in the West these frameworks are rarely applied in the ‘developing’ world. Hence in the first of its kind this study uses the overall theoretical guidance of a WSF and specific theories of welfare state regime (Esping-Anderson, 1990) and welfare regime (Gough and Wood, 2004) to examine social policy and CWB in Nepal. This study uses a critical epistemology for investigation. Whilst the study is exploratory, it has a normative-descriptive purpose. It is a qualitative study but it also incorporates a quantitative component. Data are collected by interviewing 37 children and their 35 caregivers. This is complemented with secondary data and interviews with 37 key informants. Data is analysed using a thematic analysis process using both deductive categories, derived from theoretical frameworks, and inductive categories, drawn from primary data. The study shows that while CWB is conceptualised as a multi-dimensional notion some dimensions were prioritized from a hierarchical and an objective basic needs perspective, which broadly match the five welfare services of WSF. This confirms the appropriateness of WSF as a conceptual framework. The study finds that Nepal’s social policy comprises a myriad of ad hoc welfare services that fail to secure children’s welfare. Nepal can be classified as a less effective liberal informal minimal-State welfare regime where four welfare institutions (State, market, informal networks and households) interact to produce a regime of commodification (dependence on the private sector) and adverse informalisation (dependence on informal providers) of welfare services due to the minimal-universal or selective-residual role of the State. On the other hand a small group of people, primarily from the formal sector and certain occupations (army and police), access better services. The outcome is that children are highly stratified, primarily along employment type (formal versus informal) and income, and secondarily along English speaking versus Nepali speaking and those using private versus Government services. The study finds that informalisation of child welfare services in protection was reflected in a laissez-faire approach to children’s policy which has created the informal status of children, a de-facto citizenship-less status where children are not monitored for support. The study confirms that application of the theories of both Esping-Anderson (1990), designed for advanced capitalist countries, and Gough and Wood (2004), developed for semi-capitalist countries, were useful in the case of Nepal, a semi-capitalist country. However the social policy agenda is not simply about de-commodification or de-informalisation but about combining both such that Nepal moves towards a social democratic welfare state model in the long run while pursuing a social capitalistic welfare regime model in the interim. In particular, the focus should be on ensuring egalitarianism in services rather than changing providers, formalising informal networks and making private services affordable. In the case of child protection, policy needs to be State-paternalistic and parentalist. The existence of a ‘mini’ welfare state (the army’s health and education model) reconfirms a desire for and the possibility of using it as a role model. The study findings have the capacity to help transform Nepal into a welfare state helping transform lives of millions of children as well as contribute to the efforts of developing a global social policy model.

The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, published in 1990 by Gøsta Esping-Andersen, presented a typology of welfare state regimes that seminally shaped theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of social policy and comparative welfare states. While not immune to criticism, Esping-Andersen’s typology remains widely referenced in the social sciences three decades after publication, a trend which is likely to continue into the future as well (Emmenegger et al. 2015). Taking the typology of liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare regimes as a starting point, we ask whether it is possible to identify analogous classifications of countries in terms of social policy styles. More specifically, do we find that contemporary labor market policies and policy-making still reflect the ideas underpinning Esping-Anderson’s typology? To examine these questions, we focus on three countries generally regarded as emblematic of the welfare regime types: Sweden as a social democratic case, Germany as a conservative case, and the United Kingdom as a liberal case, as well as an additional social democratic welfare state – Denmark – in order to examine intra-regime type variation in policy regimes and styles.

Welfare state typologies are generally based on the institutional design of welfare policies. In this paper we analyse whether such typologies also persist when they are applied to effective redistributive outcomes of welfare states’ tax and transfer policies. In contrast to the widespread use of macro indicators, our empirical analysis relies on internationally comparable microdata in order to account for the distribution of resources across households. We perform a hierarchical cluster analysis and check whether the classical typology for Western European welfare states reproduces the typical patterns when it comes to effective economic outcomes. We find that the established welfare regimes not only differ in their welfare state institutions as is known, but also in their economic outcomes. In particular, we identify the social-democratic, conservative, liberal and southern welfare regimes. Belgium and the Netherlands emerge as hybrid cases lying between the social-democratic and conservative model.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between type of welfare regimes and military expenditures. There is a sizeable empirical literature on the development of the welfare state and on the typology of the welfare regimes. There appear to be, however, no empirical studies that examine welfare regimes with special attention to military spending. This study aims at providing a comprehensive analysis on the topic by considering several different welfare regime typologies. To do so, we use dynamic panel data analysis for 37 countries for the period of 1988–2003 by considering a wide range of control variables such as inequality measures, number of terrorist events, and size of the armed forces. We also replicate the same analyses for the political regimes. Our findings, in line with the literature, show that there is a positive relationship between income inequality and share of military expenditures in the central government budget, and that the number of terrorist events is a significant factor that affects both the level of military expenditure and inequality. Also, the paper reveals a significant negative relationship between social democratic welfare regimes and military expenditures.

The normalisation of welfare chauvinism

Esping-Andersen (1990; 1999) was interested in identifying the similarities between countries within the three categories of welfare states that he distinguished: the by now familiar types of ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘social democratic’, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘liberal’, and the ‘continental’ or ‘conservative’ welfare states. Scharpf and Schmidt (2000a; 2000b) went further and took a closer look at differences within these categories. They studied how countries reacted to common challenges of internationalization, and found quite a few variations between countries – even within the same welfare regime. They argue that policy responses have been influenced by three sets of factors: (a) the nature and intensity of policy challenges; (b) governance institutions defining actor constellations and their modes of interaction; and (c) perceptions and preferences of the actors involved (Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000a: 1–20). This implies that the affiliation to a welfare state regime cannot alone explain or predict the modes of adaptation and reform countries choose when confronted with problems of internationalization. Does this make EspingAndersen’s typology less useful or even obsolete? Not quite. The type of welfare state, that is the manner in which it provides income to its citizens – by general taxes, by insurance, or work and residual poverty protection – and the way in which it provides services (broadly public, by the family or by subsidizing private schemes) is still a major explanatory variable of reforms. It was typical for all conservative welfare states, for example, first to try to shift the increasing unemployment problem away from the labour market, either by sending people into early retirement, into invalidity, into motherhood or into longer training, whereas it was typical for liberal welfare states to create flexible employment patterns and lower wages. Scandinavian countries had developed active labour market policies very early and, therefore, faced labour market problems later and less dramatically than most conservative welfare states. Though Esping-Andersen’s typology of welfare state families is still useful, it seems worthwhile to analyse them in more depth in order to understand the reforms and performance of welfare states when faced with challenges of internationalization. The present paper deals with EspingAndersen’s ‘continental’, ‘conservative’ and strongly ‘corporatist’ family of welfare states, made up of Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. These welfare states are rooted in the ideas of Bismarck and von Taffe (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 24). They are dominated by a system of social insurance which implies that social entitlements are derived from employment rather than citizenship (contrary to the social-democratic model) or proven needs (as in the liberal model), and which is committed to a preservation of status differentials. Social protection tends to be differentiated by occupational classes. Benefits mirror status and earnings rather than redistributive ambitions (Esping-Andersen, 1990: