Current Welfare State Research Articles

Introduction: Perspectives on Child Care, East and West

Child care is perhaps the most protean of social policies taking a variety of forms and being amenable to numerous rationales. Provisions can be justified in the name of gender equality child development welfare reform labor market needs or demographic crisis and can take the form of anything from universal state-subsidized child care centers to day-care mothers to privately employed nannies. These wide variations present a challenge to scholars making it difficult to track and especially to compare child care policies over time and across cases. Scholars have tried (and often found wanting) several different typologies ranging from Gosta Esping-Andersens welfare state regimes (1990) to Rianne Mahons (2002) models for current welfare state redesign in Europe. Feminists have of course criticized Esping-Andersen for ignoring gender but they have also discovered that even when gender is built in his three types cannot account for variations in policies toward women among cases within specific regimes. (excerpt)

The Welfare State as a Fiscal Commons: Problems of Incentives Versus Problems of Cognition

A mounting empirical literature clearly indicates that the core programs of the welfare state are unsustainable in their present form. The proximate cause of this growing fiscal instability is a demographic imbalance between younger contributors and older beneficiaries. The authors argue, however, that the ultimate cause is the institutional structure of the welfare state itself. Specifically, if its fiscal institutions are modeled as a common-pool resource, the tools and analysis emerging from the growing literature on common pools can be used. Such an analysis suggests that the apparent nonsustainability of current welfare state programs is rooted in the failure to resolve two distinct problems in institutional design. The first problem concerns how to limit the scope of opportunism among rational self-interested individuals. The second problem concerns how to limit the adverse effects of the knowledge problem among boundedly rational individual actors.

Would you like to shrink the welfare state? A survey of European citizens

Welfare state reform A survey of what Europeans want The fundamental problems facing European welfare states – high unemployment and unsustainable public pensions plans in particular – have been in the political debate for years, so why have we seen so little reform? To find out, we surveyed the opinions of citizens in France, Germany, Italy and Spain on their welfare states and on various reform options. This is what we found. First, most workers underestimate the costs of public pensions, though they are aware of their unsustainability. Second, the status quo is a majoritarian outcome: a majority of citizens opposes cuts to social security and welfare spending, but also opposes further increases. Since population ageing without reform implies an automatic expansion, our results suggest that most citizens would favour reforms that stabilize but do not shrink the current welfare states. Third, many would welcome changes in the allocation of benefits. A large number of workers in Italy and Germany would be willing to opt out of public pensions and replace them with private pensions, though the details of how this scheme is formulated matter for its popularity. And many Italians and Spaniards would welcome an extension of the coverage of unemployment insurance. Fourth, conflicts over the welfare state are mainly shaped by the economic situation of the respondent, while political ideology plays a limited role. Disagreements are found along three dimensions: young versus old, rich versus poor, and ‘outsider’ versus ‘insider’ in terms of labour market status. From a practical point of view, this suggests that there is scope to bundle reforms strategically in order to build a large and mixed coalition of supporters. — Tito Boeri, Axel Borsch‐Supan and Guido Tabellini

COLLECTIVE ACTION, MIGRATION AND WELFARE STATES

In current welfare state analysis there is little theory to explain the action of exclusive groups. This article explores the possibilities of a theory that focuses on the interaction between individual choices and strategies, the formal systems, policies and rules of governments and the informal norms and practices of groups. The argument is that club theory, a branch of public choice concepts, represents a promising new element in such an approach. A theoretical frame has to account for both collectivisation and fragmentation processes - how mass solidarities in welfare states come to be created and in turn to be broken up into narrower mutualities. Migration is used as an example to show how the actions of migrants and policy decisions about them affect these dynamics or are affected by them.

Should the Economic Life Course be Redesigned? Old Age Security in a Time of Transition

ABSTRACTThe last “great pension debate” in Canada came to an end in the early 1980s but is now about to resume. The terms of debate have changed significantly, however. As a contribution to the debate, this paper aims to identify emergent positions and the new social, economic and political conditions to which they are a response. “Conservative” strategies have emphasized privatization of the pension function and greater emphasis on providing income-tested benefits to the low income elderly. New “progressive” alternatives have advocated a redesign of the welfare state to allow for a more flexible model of retirement and the economic life course more generally. Each is a response to real changes in the fiscal capacities of governments, the conditions for successful economic performance and the distribution of economic risk among age groups. The empirical core of the paper uses data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to show how the age distribution of economic well-being has changed since the the 1960s when the current welfare state was designed. Our aim is not to resolve the debate but to set it in context and identify the main assumptions and models underlying alternative strategies for reform.