Towards a social investment welfare state? Ideas, policies and challenges. Edited by Nathalie MOREL, Bruno PALIER and Joakim PALME

Abstract

Towards a welfare state? Ideas, policies and challenges. Edited by Nathalie MOREL, Bruno PALIER and Joakim PALME. Bristol, Policy Press, 2012. xiv + 386 pp. ISBN 978-1-84742-924-7.Europe's dubious recovery from the global recession continues to be threatened by sovereign default because of the financial sector bailouts that aggravated existing public deficits and debts in a number of countries. So the order of the day still seems to be austerity, - to contain or cut public expenditure and shrink the role of the State in the economy. Yet this appears to ignore the positive role that the welfare state initially played in mitigating the impact of the global crisis with its automatic stabilizers (income replacement and transfers). This change of policy has been prompted by pressure of the financial markets, relayed to varying degrees by the international financial institutions (World Bank, IMF, European Central Bank), the OECD and the European Commission, despite the fact that their strategies for employment promotion and for competitive, innovative and inclusive economy and society have produced disappointing results. As the recessionary climate continues into 2013, the austerity measures and related cures are increasingly challenged by academics and stakeholders aspiring to a more socially responsible macroeconomic approach.As early as 2009,18 academics from different European countries, the United States and Canada examined possible alternatives for a viable social Europe, focusing on a strategy, with the ambition of modernizing the welfare state to better address new risks and needs, securing the financial and political sustainability of the welfare state, and sustaining the emerging knowledge-based economy. Central to this approach is an attempt to reconcile and economic goals, balancing economic efficiency with justice. It implies redefinition of a set of guiding principles for reforming the State, the education system, the labour market and protection systems.This book is the outcome of that project, launched in 2009 by the Stockholmbased Institute for Futures Studies with a series of conferences and seminars aiming to follow up the EU Commission's Lisbon Agenda 2000, while avoiding the implementation shortcomings in its successor strategy Europe 2020. The long-advocated social investment approach was considered to offer a possible basis for a new economic model more conducive to political mobilization.The ambitious exercise of clarifying this concept's meanings, ambitions, shortcomings and potential opens with a retrospective description of the perspective from the post-1945 emergence of the welfare state (Introduction and Chapters 2 and 3). Despite claims that the welfare state had run its course by the end of the twentieth century, the first decade of the new century saw it pursuing a reform process initiated in the late 1990s under the impetus of contributions by the OECD, Anthony Giddens, G0sta Esping-Andersen, Maria Rodrigues and others with the aim of redefining its principles, goals and institutions to adapt it to the new socio-economic context of the post-industrial era. With the aim of preparing rather than repairing, the underlying policy logic differs from the one that underpinned the post-1945 economy in that it seeks to sustain the knowledge-based economy's reliance on a skilled and flexible labour force, while covering the new needs and risks to which the population is exposed by means of a broad safety net combined with in lifelong education and training, efficient use of people's skills and qualifications, adequate labour regulation, and protection policies that enable people to access, and progress in, the labour market. In this approach, policies are considered as a productive factor that is essential to economic and employment growth, rather than a cost that hinders such growth, as they tend to be seen in the neoliberal view. …