In addition, in countries such as Germany and Austria, state employees civil servants receive privileged treatment in social insurance, particularly pensions. In this model, people, particularly men, qualify for a provision or benefit to the extent that they have contributed to a social scheme.
Employment record is decisive for acquiring social rights. Employees pay contributions to social insurance funds and receive benefits that are earnings-related and depend on contribution period. This model is typically social service-lean and transfer-heavy. These features of the conservative system imply that the existing stratification system and income inequality are largely left untouched and, in fact, tend to magnify rather than moderate existing differences in status and income.
The employed, especially those working for the state, are well-protected insiders, whereas those without a strong attachment to the labour market are outsiders whose social protection depends on their family. The model came under strain in the s and s because many of its qualities early exit schemes, passivity of benefits, dualism in protection, gender bias precluded the necessary growth of labour market participation, especially of women.
Some argue that there is a specifically southern or Mediterranean fourth model found in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. The model shares many features of the conservative one, but is characterized by much more fragmented and particularistic social insurances, a rather one-sided stress on pensions although less so in Spain , a very pronounced insider-outsider and gendered structure of the labour market, an even more pronounced role of the extended family in the state-market-family mix of social protection, an under-developed social assistance system and clientelism in the allocation of benefits and jobs in the public sector.
These welfare state models, in short, differ substantially in how much they are committed to spend, but what matters most for social outcomes, such as social protection and inequality, is on what specific social purposes that money is spent, how the programmes are organized, taxed and financed and how transfer- or service-oriented they are.
Generosity depends on the replacement rates of key social benefits, the duration of such benefits, the kinds of demands people have to meet in order to qualify for a benefit, the number of waiting days included in the rules and how many people are covered by the social scheme. In chart 1, countries are ranked high to low according to their generosity index in The higher the score on this index, the more generous the systems are.
As can be seen from the table, in , the Swedish social democratic welfare state was the most generous and the Australian liberal welfare state was the most tight-fisted. In , the most generous welfare states were the social democratic countries except Finland , closely followed by the conservative countries.
Chart 1 also shows that in terms of generosity, the neat picture of the three worlds of welfare states has become somewhat blurred in The liberal welfare states have remained quite clearly distinctive in the relatively humble levels of bigheartedness of their welfare states.
Interestingly, the United Kingdom seems to have become much more of a liberal welfare state than it used to be, dropping from place 9 in to 12 in Some of the social democratic states have become much less generous too. Three continental European countries Belgium, the Netherlands and France have surpassed the social democratic welfare states except Norway in generosity in The biggest change is found in Ireland, where the welfare state generosity index jumps from Even though the precise ranking of welfare states and the composition of the models have changed, it is obvious that there are still clear differences in the quality of welfare states as measured by the generosity index.
The generosity index cannot inform us precisely about the redistributive features of the welfare states, but it seems reasonable to suspect that the more generous systems are also more egalitarian. And, indeed, there is a reasonably strong negative correlation between how generous welfare states are and how much inequality they produce Jensen and Van Kersbergen The OECD has published interesting data on how welfare states redistribute and which income groups profit relatively most from social benefits.
It turns out that welfare states differ enormously in which income groups they most privilege. The southern European welfare states transfer a much higher proportion of social benefits to the highest income group than to the lowest one.
Portugal also has one of the highest levels of inequality. There are two important causes for this phenomenon. First, most transfers in these countries are simply not meant to help the poor exclusively, but rather are to cover the social risks of all social strata. Second, benefits for the retired, disabled and unemployed are often linked to contribution period and are earnings-related, so that relatively more goes to the well-off than to the poor.
This means that income redistribution in the pension-heavy welfare states is not from the rich to the poor, but primarily from one period in life to another. In other words, inequalities produced during working life are directly reproduced, rather than moderated, in retirement. This redistributive pattern contrasts sharply with the liberal and social democratic welfare states, in which the bottom group receives relatively more than the top.
The main reason is that the relatively high level of transfers to the bottom income group can be an effect of two different things: either a high level of overall spending, as in the Nordic countries, or targeting through means testing i. Another thing to take into account is that much of the effect of the welfare state on inequality depends on how social benefits and services are financed and allocated.
The universalist and comprehensive tax-financed systems that are characteristic of the social democratic model turn out to be much more redistributive than the targeted systems, even if there is no progressivity in taxation see Rothstein In a way, this is counterintuitive because these welfare states are very generous to the middle class and do not target the poor. In fact, higher income groups disproportionally profit from social services, especially health care and education.
Hence, one would expect a fully means-tested system, in which a disproportional proportion of benefits goes to the poor, to be much more redistributive. However, means-tested systems tend to be tight-fisted, whereas social democratic universalist systems distribute much larger sums of money, and as a result, the latter come out as much more redistributive than the more targeted and means-tested ones, a phenomenon called the paradox of redistribution Korpi and Palme The effect of the welfare state on inequality depends on how social benefits and services are financed and allocated.
The redistributive effect of the welfare state can be directly measured by the percentage difference through transfers and taxes between inequality in market income and inequality of disposable income. Income redistribution is the outcome of public spending on cash benefits, how much the tax-benefit system targets the poor and the progressivity of the tax system.
Adema et al. Interestingly enough, the countries with the lowest income inequality, namely the social democratic welfare states of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, are not among the countries with the top redistributive tax-benefit systems.
This, first of all, reflects the fact that these countries have relatively equal market income distributions in the first place. Welfare states and welfare state models are not static institutions; on the contrary, they are continuously updated and adapted to constantly changing social, economic and political circumstances, including shocks, such as the financial crisis and the economic recession that followed in its wake. As documented in more detail elsewhere Van Kersbergen and Hemerijck ; see extensively Hemerijck , all welfare state models have undergone significant changes in the main areas relevant to social policies.
In macroeconomic policy, countries have converged around a policy framework centred on economic stability, hard currencies, low inflation, sound budgets and debt reduction. The introduction of Economic and Monetary Union turned monetary policy into a fixed parameter for policy reform in other fields. Most countries have also responded to internationalization with wage restraint, usually backed by broad social pacts between employers, unions and the government.
Everywhere, there has been a reorientation of labour market policy towards activation with a view to maximize labour market participation. All welfare states have increased work incentives, although not all have managed to the same extent to accompany this stick with the carrot of human capital investment.
Another general trend has been labour market deregulation, particularly decreasing job protection, in order to make labour markets more flexible and to create opportunities for labour market outsiders. There are, however, large differences between countries in that only some e.
More generally, the trend in social insurance has been to focus more on labour market re- integration than on income maintenance. Retrenchment of unemployment protection has been part of the flexibility venture almost everywhere, although minimum income schemes have been introduced or improved in a number of countries where these were lacking. Welfare states are continuously updated and adapted to constantly changing circumstances, including the financial crisis and the economic recession.
Everywhere, reforms have been introduced to make pension systems sustainable under conditions of low or declining fertility and increasing life expectancy see European Commission Measures include increasing the retirement age, limiting early exit, introducing occupational and private pillars on top of the public schemes and redefining the actuarial links between contributions and benefits.
Many countries have also increased their efforts to assist people in their attempts to reconcile work and family, for example, by extending child care and pre-school facilities and other services as well as parental leave provisions. In Europe, policy reforms in welfare states of various kinds have often taken inspiration from the idea of social investment.
The basic conviction is that social policies should not just passively compensate for social mishap, but should more proactively be used to prevent labour market inactivity, to adopt a life course perspective e.
Increasing the capacity of individuals over the life course to remain in employment not only provides a high level of social security, but also greatly enhances the long-term financial sustainability of the welfare state. Investments in children are particularly promising, because they help smooth inequalities in cognitive abilities and health and prevent an accumulation of disadvantages over the life course, which would otherwise increase demands on passive welfare Kvist The European Commission has promoted social investment as the key policy framework to guide member states in their social policy reforms European Commission and to reach the goals of the Europe strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.
Before the financial crisis hit, social investment was rapidly becoming the foundation of a new policy paradigm in most if not all welfare states as well as at the European Union level. One ingredient of the social investment strategy, namely employment and activation policies, was adopted everywhere and has helped to increase labour force participation, especially among women and older men.
The economic recession, however, has greatly amplified the financial pressure on the welfare state, both by multiplying the number of people on benefits and by decreasing the financial contributions for social policy.
Virtually everywhere this has led governments to increase their austerity policy efforts and to retrench on social entitlements so as to help rebalance the public budget. Even though in discourse the social investment agenda still seems intact, particularly at the European level, it has also become increasingly clear that social investment policies are particularly vulnerable to cuts in the short run, precisely because social investments yield returns only in the longer run, while cost containment is a necessity now.
Let me take as an example the social democratic welfare states, in which the social investment path has been followed far longer than anywhere else and where it has become an intrinsic component of the welfare state paradigm. The effects are evident in the use of public services, where the social democratic welfare states stand out in the large number of children they enrol in pre-education and children and adults in education schools, training institutions, etc.
The public provision of childcare, education, work-life reconciliation initiatives and active employment policies not only provide people with the skills to work, but they also free up time to participate in the labour market and generate jobs.
As a result, labour market participation rates of men and women are highest in the social democratic welfare states. Finally, as is well known, income inequality and poverty rates are lowest in the social democratic countries. Recent trends, however, seem to indicate a change of direction even in the social democratic social investment approach, namely a move away from universalism and inclusive social investment, with rising selectivity in social policy as an effect of tighter eligibility criteria, more targeting and privatization.
Similarly, focusing on outcomes, there are signs of rising inequality and poverty as an effect of direct retrenchment and policy drift, that is, not updating social policies to new needs see Van Kersbergen and Kraft The point to stress here is that if the social democratic welfare states are finding it already increasingly difficult to uphold their allegiance to the social investment oriented welfare state, then it is highly likely that other types of welfare states will find it close to impossible to remain committed to the social investment path they had started to follow before the financial crisis.
The financial meltdown of and the subsequent recession caused all welfare states to experience similar problems, including rising unemployment, reduced credibility of the banking sector, falling exports and rising budget deficits.
Because of the problem similarity, governments initially responded in roughly similar ways. The immediate response was to massively support the financial sector and to protect demand by continuing existing social policies and introducing temporary measures to stimulate demand. But bailing out banks, recapitalizing them and a host of other measures to save the financial sector added up to a very high bill. And on top of that came rising social expenditures and decreasing taxes and contributions, which put public budgets under extreme financial pressure.
The recession caused all welfare states to experience rising unemployment, reduced credibility of the banking sector, falling exports and rising budget deficits. Interestingly enough, the financial crisis of and the Great Recession that followed in its wake, for obvious reasons, were not blamed on the welfare state, at least not initially.
In fact, the welfare state was celebrated for how it cushioned the harmful effects of the crisis as its automatic stabilizers did exactly what they were meant to do: automatically stabilize demand and protect people from hardship.
Because states took responsibility for the massive private debt that banks had caused by socializing it as public debt, the banking crisis was turned into a sovereign debt crisis, as if it had been the welfare states, rather than the banks, which had caused the predicament.
Thus, the problem became reformulated as one of excessive welfare state spending and public debt, which had to be battled by a severe politics of austerity in order to solve the financial crisis and stimulate the economy.
The ideal Social-Democratic welfare state is based on the principle of universalism granting access to benefits and services based on citizenship. Such a welfare state is said to provide a relatively high degree of autonomy, limiting the reliance of family and market.
Christian-democratic welfare states are based on the principle of subsidiarity and the dominance of social insurance schemes, offering a medium level of decommodification and a high degree of social stratification.
On the other hand, the liberal regime is based on the notion of market dominance and private provision; ideally, the state only interferes to ameliorate poverty and provide for basic needs, largely on a means-tested basis.
The American welfare state was designed to address market shortcomings and do what private enterprises cannot or will not do. Unlike welfare states built on social democracy foundations it was not designed to promote a redistribution of political power from capital to labor; nor was it designed to mediate class struggle.
Income redistribution, through programs such as the Earned income tax credit EITC , has been defended on the grounds that the market cannot provide goods and services universally, while interventions going beyond transfers are justified by the presence of imperfect information, imperfect competition, incomplete markets, externalities, and the presence of public goods. The welfare state, whether through charitable redistribution or regulation that favors smaller players, is motivated by reciprocal altruism.
Unlike in Europe, Christian democratic and social democratic theories have not played a major role in shaping welfare policy in the United States. Entitlement programs in the U. Between and , modern American liberalism dominated U. In , total U. Welfare reform has attempted many times to remove welfare altogether by promoting self-sufficiency, but has been unsuccessful in this regard thus far.
Welfare reform refers to improving how a nation helps those citizens in poverty. In the United States, the term was used to get Congress to enact the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which further reduced aid to the poor, to reduce government deficit spending without coining money.
Social programs in the United States are welfare subsidies designed to aid the needs of the U. This gave states no incentive to direct welfare funds to the neediest recipients or to encourage individuals to go off welfare benefits the state lost federal money when someone left the system.
In , under the Bill Clinton administration, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which gave more control of the welfare system to the states though there are basic requirements the states need to meet with regards to welfare services. Still, most states offer basic assistance, such as health care, food stamps, child care assistance, unemployment, cash aid, and housing assistance. Each state must meet certain criteria to ensure recipients are being encouraged to work themselves out of welfare.
It encourages states to require some sort of employment search in exchange for providing funds to individuals, and imposes a five-year lifetime limit on cash assistance.
The bill restricts welfare from most legal immigrants and increased financial assistance for child care. The late s were also considered an unusually strong economic time, and critics voiced their concern about what would happen in an economic downturn. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Social Policy. The same cartoon was published on the Mirror's front page on the morning of the most remarkable general election of the 20th century. But when the result was announced on July 26 - three weeks after polling day to allow military postal votes to be counted - it was clear that postwar politics had changed utterly.
With The Conservatives, with The new prime minister was Churchill's deputy in the war time coalition, Clement Attlee. On the first day of the new parliament, the massed ranks of Labour members bawled out the socialist anthem, the Red Flag. Tories everywhere were scandalised.
There is a splendid apocryphal story of a lady in a grand London hotel who was overheard exclaiming "Labour in power? The country will never stand for it! The new prime minister was not obviously cut out for the job. Painfully shy and reserved to the point of coldness, he had the appearance - and often the style - of a bank clerk. Churchill described him, cruelly, as "a sheep in sheep's clothing". The son of a City solicitor, he was educated at Haileybury College - which specialised in turning out administrators for the British Raj - and at University College, Oxford.
Attlee was so far from being a passionate ideologue that his wife Violet once casually observed: "Clem was never really a socialist, were you, darling? Well, not a rabid one. Yet this essentially herbivorous exterior cloaked a steely determination, and a deepseated devotion to social justice first developed during his voluntary work in London's East End before the first world war.
After distinguished service in that war, Attlee entered parliament in , and served in the first two Labour governments. In , he declined to join Ramsey Macdonald's national coalition, preferring to stay with the rump opposition. He became Labour leader in Though many on the left opposed Labour participation in Churchill's wartime coalition at least during the early years when Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union under Stalin , Attlee responded to the national crisis by guiding his party into the national government.
He became Lord Privy Seal and, from , deputy prime minister. He was 62 when he entered Downing Street. The great tide of new Labour MPs who entered the Commons in included some eager youngsters who were to make their mark on the party, and indeed the country. But the men Attlee leaned on were of course of Labour's old guard. His principal props were Ernest Bevin , a pragmatic trade unionist who had made his mark during the war as an energetic labour minister, Labour stalwart Hugh Dalton , and Stafford Cripps , an aloof intellectual Churchilll once remarked of him: "There but for the grace of God, goes God.
The Attlee-Bevin alliance was particularly important in protecting the administration from some of its own hotter blooded members, who shared the young Healey's enthusiasm for revolution. Their most potent figurehead was Aneurin Bevan , a fiery orator from the Welsh valleys, who constantly urged the government to embrace radical reforms , and bitterly resisted any suggestion of pragmatic trimming of policy. Bevan eventually was to deal the Attlee administration a hammer blow, when he resigned over the reintroduction of NHS prescription charges.
For six years, though, his was the voice of radical Labour. The manifesto pledged nationalisation of the Bank of England, the fuel and power industries, inland transport, and iron and steel.
And with a majority of more than , the party could not be denied. One by one the key industries of the postwar economy tumbled into the public sector, where they were subject to elaborate planning controls. For the most part the takeovers were highly popular; none more so than the nationalisation of the coalmines. Pit owners still employed a million men, many of them in dire and dangerous conditions. The new national coal board was seen as much as a humanitarian institution as an economic one.
Other nationalisation operations were regarded more cynically. No sooner had British Railways taken over the old regional semi-private networks than jokes began to circulate about unreliable, crowded trains, crumbling stations and that old standby of British comedy, the buffet sandwich.
After the initial euphoria of nationalisation, it wasn't long before doubts began to emerge. The state industries were smothered by bureaucracy and the demands of Labour's economic gurus, both amateur and professional. Their bolder ideas were often subsumed in the delicate balance between principle and pragmatism. It became clear that the lumbering machinery of economic planning could not deliver what the voters had demanded and Labour had promised: full employment, secure jobs with fair wages, an end to wartime rationing and - above all perhaps - decent homes for all.
It has sometimes been argued that the Attlee government's main disadvantage was that Britain had been on the winning side in the war. British cities and industries had been bashed around by German air raids, but had not suffered the wholesale destruction which allowed the renascent German economy to start from a clean sheet.
More importantly, British economic class structures - and bitter enmities - survived the war unscathed, in contrast to those countries which had been traumatised by invasion and occupation none more so than Germany into rethinking their economic cultures. But there were other obstacles in the path of Labour's would-be revolutionaries. The country, to put it brutally, was broke. It had poured its wealth into the war effort and in was groaning under a mountain of debt.
It had pawned many of its most valuable assets, including a huge slice of overseas investments, to service that debt. And even when the war was finally over, the victorious, impoverished British maintained vast numbers of men and resources tied up in an empire on which the sun was about to set. In Europe, Britain paid for a huge army of occupation in Germany. The dawn of the nuclear age, and British pride, demanded handsome investment in the new terrible weapons which would keep us allegedly a first class power.
The disarmament, which some in the Labour party craved, proved illusory as - in Churchill's words again - an iron curtain descended across Europe, and the cold war began. Speaking of cold, even the weather seemed at times to conspire against Labour.
0コメント