Introduction: The Welfare Economics of the Welfare State (original) (raw)

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Welfare States and the Economy Forthcoming in

2016

The literature on welfare states or, more modestly, systems of social protection, has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. Since the publication of the first edition of this Handbook, major progress has been made in three research areas: the relationship between welfare states and production regimes, gendered determinants and outcomes of welfare state regimes, and the distributive outcomes of welfare states. Esping-Andersen ended his chapter in the first edition with a call for an embedded approach to the study of welfare states, for a relational analysis of the welfare state – economy nexus. Two developments have contributed to the advancement of such an approach: progress in research on production regimes in advanced industrial societies, and the dramatic impact of economic transformations on the systems of social protection in ex-communist countries and in Latin America. Progress in research on the gender dimension of the welfare stateeconomy nexus has been spurred by chan...

Development of Welfare State Theory: A Review of the Literature

2017

The already existing challenges of the welfare state, the new social risks and aging population are coupled with the new phenomena of financial crisis, Euro-crisis, debt crisis and the lack of economic growth that has followed in recent years since leads to converging and diverging welfare outcomes as well. Welfare state retrenchment dominates politics today, strict austerity policies have been widely adopted in Europe since 2008. For a better understanding of the current pressures on the welfare states the paper reviews the historical development and the theoretical arguments against and in favour of the concept.

The Welfare State and the Market Economy: Which Way Ahead

2011

This paper concentrates on the conservative challenge to the welfare state and the response of the supporters of the progressive social policy. The central question addressed is whether there is a major trade off between the pursuit of “social justice” and individual liberty. Would the society sacrifice her liberty in order to achieve a higher level of distributive social justice? We discuss whether the progression of the welfare state and the expansion of social expenditures have endangered individual freedom and democracy or have enhanced freedom and created a more universal system of rights as some liberal thinkers have argued. We further discuss whether the historical developments point to an ethical ground or the necessity of social policy as an integral component of a capitalist economy. THE EVOLUTION OF THE WELFARE STATE IN THE CONTEXT OF CAPITALISM It is ironic that the more universal notion of „social justice‟ came into being around the middle of the 19 th century, just whe...

The Welfare State: A Fundamental Dimension of Modern Government

European Journal of Sociology, 2014

What, in fact,isthe Welfare State? This article traces the emergence of the welfare state as a specific mode of government, describing its distinctive rationality as well as its characteristic forms, functions and effects. It identifies five sectors of welfare governance, the relations between them, and the various forms these take in different times and places. It discusses the contradictory commitments that shape welfare state practices and the problems associated with these practices and contradictions. It situates welfare state government within a long-term account of the changing relations between the social and the economic spheres. And it argues that the welfare state ought to be understood as a “normal social fact”—an essential (though constantly contested) part of the social and economic organization of modern capitalist societies.

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