Welfare States

"In the last quarter of the 20th century, many firms significantly expanded their operations across national borders. It has been argued that, as a result, they have become disembedded from the national economic fields in which they conduct their business and have experienced a race to the bottom in their corporate labor policy. In this dissertation Sander Quak argues that this contention does not accurately describe the recent development of transnational firms and their corporate labor policy. Rather, transnational firms experienced a significant shift in their dual embeddedness in national and transnational economic fields. They were restructured in line with the competitive conditions in the transnational economic field, but the competitive conditions in the national economic fields continue to be of great importance for their corporate labor policy. Consequently, the recent development of their corporate labor policy is characterized by processes of centralization, instrumentalization, and polarization.
"

This paper decomposes global inequality in redistribution, using data from the World Development Indicators data set of the World Bank. It finds that per capita income has a modest, yet persistent effect on redistribution. More provocatively, the paper also demonstrates that, over and beyond the impact of per capita GDP, global inequalities in redistribution over the last generation or so strongly reflect the double legacies of colonialism (improving the likelihood of redistribution in former-colonizer societies and sharply reducing it in erstwhile-colonized, recently independent societies). In addition, it also finds that the history of recent exposure to state socialism increases the presence of redistributive institutions, partly counterbalancing the effects of lower national incomes. The data have been obtained from the World Bank's online open-access data site World Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has supported this project as part of its programme of research and innovative development projects, which it hopes will be of value to policy makers, practitioners and service users. The facts presented and views expressed in this report are, however, those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation.

The recent stress on the productive potential of social policy provides a new economic rationale for social policy provision. However, it is a mistaken perception that the majority of social policies need to be radically adjusted to changes in the economic and social order. Rather, this paper argues that we need to better understand the ways in which long-standing policies have enabled and continue to facilitate adaptation to ongoing social and economic changes. To fail to do so risks severing or otherwise upsetting vital social policy synergies. The paper is based on a dissertation that developed a conceptual framework for thinking about social policies in the welfare state that may be both protective and productive; that is, that reduce posttax/transfer poverty without decreasing pretax/transfer (market) earnings. Observing that some countries with expensive social policies appear to be able to achieve high poverty reduction without adverse effects on economic performance, the study argued that theoretical explanations for this pattern are lacking. Applying social developmentalist ideas to the welfare state literature, it argued that the severity of the tradeoff between efficiency and equality may vary by the types and combinations of social policies that countries employ. The study offered a theoretical explanation for how and why different types of conventional social policy that occur across welfare states might be expected to produce outcomes that are simultaneously protective and productive. This paper describes the logic underlying the effects of what the author defines as developmental welfare state policies (DWSPs).

Following more than a decade of intense debate, the long-term care system in England may be on the verge of major change. We argue that the current system can be characterized as a residual system where care is free only to those who cannot afford to pay for themselves, with access heavily targeted to those with the highest levels of needs and with no informal care, and with substantial local variation in access and means-testing for home care. It is also characterized by a mixed economy of supply of care and a mixed economy of finance. The government Green Paper has proposed a major shift from diverse local systems to a new National Care Service, with a national entitlement to some public support for all those who are assessed as needing it. The government has also recently announced that it will make personal care at home free to those with the highest needs. If implemented, the proposals included in the Green Paper would, at minimum, introduce a 'quasi-universal' system, in which some level of assistance is provided to all those with eligible social care needs.

The majority of the Member States of the European Union have undertaken remarkably comprehensive welfare and labor market reforms in the years since the 1990s. Many of these reforms, however, have not followed the conventional retrenchment and deregulation recipes, but rather took a liking to social pacts, activation, active ageing/avoidance of early retirement, part-time work, lifelong learning, parental leave, gender mainstreaming, flexicurity (balancing flexibility with security), reconciling work and family life. At first sight, these reforms seem to have resulted in relatively robust employment growth, especially for women and more recently older workers. European economic integration has fundamentally recast the boundaries of national systems of employment regulation and social protection, both by constraining the autonomy for domestic policy options but also by opening opportunities for EU-led social and employment coordination and agenda setting.

Désormais célèbre depuis le mouvement Occupy Wall Street, le 1 % le plus riche a connu deux évolutions différentes alors que la concentration des revenus en leur faveur a été peu importante dans les pays européens et au Japon, le 1 % des pays anglophones a connu une fulgurante ascension, parfois au détriment du 99 % restant. Pourtant, ces deux groupes de pays ont vécu les mêmes changements technologiques et la mondialisation de l'économie, jugés responsables de la montée des inégalités dans les pays développés. À la source de ces chemins différents se trouvent des institutions différentes : impôts, normes sociales, type de régulation, taux de syndicalisation, etc.
Qu'en est-il pour le Québec? Bien qu'il fasse partie d'un continent anglophone et inégalitaire, le Québec suit une tendance et un niveau de concentration de ses hauts revenus se comparant davantage à l'Europe et le Japon que les États-Unis et le Canada. À l'aide des Statistiques fiscales des particuliers, nous avons pu dresser l'évolution des différents revenus du 1 % le plus riche au Québec et du 99 % restant : salaires, gains de capital, dividendes.
Bien que les institutions économiques et politiques soient identifiées comme étant la cause de cette évolution différente, il n’existe pas de théorie permettant d’expliquer pourquoi les hauts revenus des pays développés anglophones connaissent une évolution différente des pays non anglophones depuis les années 1980.
Nous expliquons cette particularité avec deux théories de modèles institutionnels, soit les variétés de capitalisme et les régimes d’État-providence. Aussi, l’impôt est une institution qui a un impact significatif sur l’évolution des hauts revenus. Nous abordons les mécanismes de l’impôt sur le revenu permettant de bloquer ou d’accroître la part des revenus captée par le 1 % le plus riche.

Special Issue, The Origins of the Welfare State: Global and Comparative Approaches Co-edited by Agnoletto, S. and Palmieri, C. http://zapruderworld.org/journal/archive/volume-3/overcoming-barriers-to-voluntary-servitude-positive-thinking-and-self-help-the-post-political-ideology-of-workfare/

European welfare states are cutting back their responsibilities for long-term care, emphasising ‘self-reliance’ and replacing care as an entitlement of citizenship with targeted services. But we do not know how former long-term care recipients cope with retrenchment and if they are able to negotiate support from their family and friends. Through an analysis of 500 telephone interviews and thirty face-to-face interviews with long-term care recipients facing reduced care rights in the Netherlands, we found that disabled and elderly persons resist increased dependence on their personal networks. Most clients who face reduced access to public long-term care do not seek alternative help despite their perceived need for it, and feel trapped between the policy definition of self-reliance and their own ideals of autonomy.

The European Union coordinates and encourages Member State actions to combat poverty, and to reform their social protection systems on the basis of policy exchanges and mutual learning ('best practices'). Some EU countries are more effective in poverty reduction than others. What can explain these variations in effectiveness? This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social transfers in alleviating poverty. We focus on EU15 countries, but also include other OECD countries in our analysis. We compare poverty rates at the levels of market and disposable incomes, that is before and after transfers, in order to analyze the effect of tax and transfer policies in reducing poverty, i.e. to determine the target efficiency of social transfers. We perform several tests with the most recent data (LIS, OECD, SOCX, and Eurostat: ECHP/EU-SILC). Finally, we perform several partial analyses by disaggregating poverty rates to socioeconomic and demographic conditions in order to investigate to what extent variations at the social program level (such as old age pensions, child benefits) affect the measured effectiveness of the welfare state in alleviating poverty. Empirical results draw heavily on how pensions are treated-as primary income or as transfer. We find a strong relationship between levels of social spending and antipoverty effects of social transfers and taxes across EU15 countries. Social spending seems to be an important determinant of a country's poverty outcome, especially among the elderly, when pensions are considered as transfers. Our analysis highlights some crosscountry differences in targeting of social expenditures on poverty alleviation in EU15 and non-EU15 countries around 2005. We introduce an indicator of Public Policy Effectiveness on Poverty Alleviation across countries. Each percentage point of social expenditure alleviates poverty in both EU15 and non-EU15 countries by .7 percentage points on average. Relatively high scores in EU15 countries are found for Ireland and Scandinavian countries, while Italy, Greece and Spain score lowest. Outside Europe the poorest scores are reported for Korea and the USA. Country ranking appears to be rather stable over time when outcomes for 1995 and 2005 are compared, although some of our results may be sensitive to cyclical factors. Finally, we analyzed poverty among vulnerable age groups. Our results show that family programs and child support alleviate poverty among children to a large extent, especially in non-EU15 countries. For public and private old age pension and survivors schemes we find no effect on poverty in case pensions are considered as transfers (both in EU15 and non-EU15 countries). However, this picture changes completely when pensions are counted as transfers. In that case the poverty rate among elderly in EU15 falls from 90 to 21 percent through taxes and social transfers!

Nowadays, participation in adult education is considered as in individual responsibility. However, participation is the result of a complex bounded agency between individuals, educational institutions and regulating governments . This paper explores the motivation of 12,000 European adult learners in formal adult education in 12 European countries. Analyses show consistent patterns comparable to welfare state typologies (Esping-Andersen 1990). Further exploration makes clear that motivation to participate in an adult education course can be interpreted in relation with labour market, education and social policy in the country of participation.

Some materials presented in this thesis have been published or been accepted for publication as journal articles. In addition, some materials have been presented as conference papers. Abstracts for each of these articles are attached in Annexe A.

In this paper we aim to study and compare the countries of the former EU-15 in terms of the difference in labour market conditions between mothers and non-mothers and we look at how public policies can be designed in order to minimise the employment penalties associated with the presence of young children and thus promote parenthood by working women. As women choose to take part in paid employment, fertility rates will depend on their possibilities to combine employment and motherhood. As a result, the motherhood-induced employment penalties discussed in this paper as well as the role of public policies should be given priority attention by politicians and policy-makers. Firstly, in this paper we start out from a multinomial logit model to analyse motherhood-induced employment gaps in the EU-15. Then, various decomposition techniques (the method of recycled prediction and the and technique adapted to the non-linear case) are applied to the computed gross FTE employment gaps between mothers and non-mothers to isolate the net employment effect associated with the presence of children from that of differences in characteristics between mothers and non-mothers. Special attention is also given to the specific role of education to contain the negative labour market consequences that derive from the presence of young children. It seems that differences in characteristics such as age, education and non labour personal income do not influence a lot the difference in employment status. Secondly, we use an OLS regression to confront motherhood-induced employment penalties with selfconstructed country-specific indicators of child policies, used as explanatory variables, in order to test the impact and effectiveness of policies of different design and generosity on these employment gaps that separate mothers of young children from non-mothers and mothers with grown up children. We round off our analysis by presenting a new typology and country-specific overview of the adjustment mechanisms applied by career-pursuing mothers on the labour market as well as of the supportiveness of different child policies. In the conclusion, we carefully review the main results of this research, advance a number of policy recommendations and suggest interesting avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine from a multidimensional perspective the possible existence of a single path that could have conditioned the degree of welfare state development (WSD) in Latin America. Economic/industrial development, trade-openness, democracy and the strength of leftist parties-labour movement are used as explanatory variables in the qualitative comparative analysis. In contrast to previous findings, this paper shows that there is no evidence of a common path followed by countries with a relatively high/medium WSD. Nevertheless, countries that experienced a low economic/industrial development combined with a low democratic experience were conditioned to have a low WSD.

Social trust is shaped by many society-level as well as individual-level factors. One of the determinants highly debated in literature is the welfare state which reflects the level of state intervention in organizing individuals' welfare. Theoretical as well as empirical studies are in their vast majority controversial with respect to the kind of effects welfare state may have on social trust formation. However, all of them have one element in common -they measure welfare state development through social spending. The main objective of this research consists of demonstrating that in order to precisely estimate this impact, it is necessary to introduce a new operationalization for welfare state development which would reflect the outcomes rather than the process of the state intervention into individuals' arrangements. The latter can be obtained by decomposing Esping-Andersen's welfare regime typology and directly evaluating the effects of decommodification and stratification on social trust indexes. This hypothesis is checked based on a cross-sectional analysis for a set of 18 OECD countries while using multi-level modelling as the main research method. The individual-level analysis demonstrates that decommodification enhances trust formation. The aggregated-level analysis allows for explaining that this positive effect of decommodification on social trust mainly goes through reduction of income inequality which is the key aim of social policies. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that the quality of public institutions, in general, and welfare institutions, in particular, conducts essential influence on the level of trust in the societies. Besides decommodification, the form of social stratification was found to matter for social trust. Preserving existing class structure inherent to conservative welfare regime type influences negatively institutional trust, but positively interpersonal trust. Stigmatizing approach apt to liberal welfare state erodes interpersonal trust, but boosts institutional trust. Finally, socialism's universal approach leads to crowding-in effects in both forms of social trust.

A growing body of empirical studies have reported that social inequalities in health are as large (or even larger) in the Nordic welfare states than in many less egalitarian societies. This is highly surprising since the welfare state is rooted in income equality, free access to education and health services, and a generous social benefit system. This paper reviews this literature, and provides an explanation of this paradox based on the most common causal mechanism studied, namely the one that goes from income (or another socio economic variable) to health. We start by showing that the concentration index is much more sensitive to health contingent income transfers than income contingent health transfers. Then, we introduce a simple model where health is caused by status (relative income) and show that there actually exists as possibility that stratified societies may have lower health inequality than egalitarian societies, everything else equal, if class is unobservable. Thus, there may be a tradeoff between income and health equality. However, due to the insensitivity of the concentration index of health transfers, this tradeoff may not be shown by such inequality measures. A higher social health inequality as found in empirical studies, may therefore just be a sign of a more equal income distribution.

Cet article analyse l'influence de l'Europe sur le devenir des systèmes nationaux de protection sociale. Il est possible de distinguer trois phases distinctes qui ont marqué les interactions entre construction européenne et États-providence : une première phase d'expansion (années 1950 à 1970) au cours de laquelle le niveau européen cherche à construire un marché commun tout en permettant un rattrapage vers le haut en matière de protection sociale ; une deuxième phase conflictuelle (années 1980 et 1990) pendant laquelle l'approfondissement de la construction économique européenne crée de nouvelles tensions avec les politiques sociales héritées du passé ; une troisième phase (fin des années 1990 et 2000) durant laquelle des politiques européennes tentent de réconcilier politiques économiques et nouvelles politiques sociales. L'analyse de chacune de ces phases nécessite de tenir compte des initiatives européennes susceptibles d'avoir un impact (direct ou indirect) sur les systèmes nationaux de protection sociale et nécessite aussi de tenir compte des institutions nationales de protection sociale et des stratégies adoptées.

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

This paper reports findings from a European Commission funded study of future long-term care expenditure in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, and presents projections of future long-term care expenditure in the four countries under a number of assumptions about the future. Macro-simulation (or cell-based) models were used to make comparable projections based on a set of common assumptions. A central base-case served as a point of comparison by which to explore the sensitivity of the models to alternative scenarios for the key determinants. The sensitivity of the models to variant assumptions about the future numbers of older people, the prevalence of functional dependency and informal care, patterns of long-term provision, and macroeconomic conditions are examined. It was found that, under the base-case, the proportion of gross domestic product spent on long-term care is projected to more than double between 2000 and 2050 in each country. The projected future demand for longterm care services for older people is sensitive to assumptions about the future number of older people, the prevalence of dependency and the availability of informal care, and projected expenditure is sensitive to assumptions about rises in the real unit-costs of services and the structure of the models. It is important, for planning purposes, to recognise the considerable uncertainty about future levels of long-term care expenditure.

Despite prominent and compelling theoretical arguments linking manufacturing imports from the global South to rising income inequality in the global North, the literature has produced decidedly mixed support for such arguments. We explain this mixed support by introducing intervening processes at the global and national levels. At the global level, evolving characteristics of global production networks (GPNs) amplify the effect of Southern imports. At the national level, wage-coordination and welfare state generosity counteract the mechanisms by which Southern imports increase inequality, and thereby mitigate their effects. We conduct a time-series cross-section regression analyses of income inequality among 18 advanced capitalist countries to these propositions. Our analysis addresses alternative explanations, as well as validity threats related to model specification, sample composition and measurement. We find substantial variation in the effect of Southern imports across global ...

Cet article analyse l'influence de l'Europe sur le devenir des systèmes nationaux de protection sociale. Il est possible de distinguer trois phases distinctes qui ont marqué les interactions entre construction européenne et États-providence : une première phase d'expansion (années 1950 à 1970) au cours de laquelle le niveau européen cherche à construire un marché commun tout en permettant un rattrapage vers le haut en matière de protection sociale ; une deuxième phase conflictuelle (années 1980 et 1990) pendant laquelle l'approfondissement de la construction économique européenne crée de nouvelles tensions avec les politiques sociales héritées du passé ; une troisième phase (fin des années 1990 et 2000) durant laquelle des politiques européennes tentent de réconcilier politiques économiques et nouvelles politiques sociales. L'analyse de chacune de ces phases nécessite de tenir compte des initiatives européennes susceptibles d'avoir un impact (direct ou indirect) sur les systèmes nationaux de protection sociale et nécessite aussi de tenir compte des institutions nationales de protection sociale et des stratégies adoptées.

I construct a model of public policy development, and use the model to explain why the United States has a comparatively small public sector, but instead a large "private welfare state"with employment-based bene…ts. The key actors are politically organized …rms and labor unions. These interest groups can use campaign support to in ‡uence a political decision-maker who decides whether to implement a social bene…t. In addition, the …rms can in ‡uence the outcome indirectly by privately providing their own workers with the bene…t. This setup leads to three possible outcomes. In the …rst, no one is provided the social bene…t. In the second, all workers receive it through government provision. In the third, some workers receive the policy, through their employers. I argue that the features leading to the third equilibrium correspond closely to political institutions and industry characteristics of the US, while the features of the second equilibrium better describe European countries. This paper was part of my dissertation at Yale University. I would like to thank Ben Polak for excellent guidance, and

Work-family policy strategies reflect gendered assumptions about the roles of men and women within families and therefore may lead to significantly different outcomes, particularly for families headed by single mothers. The authors argue that welfare states have adopted strategies based on different assumptions about women's and men's roles in society, which then affect women's chances of living in poverty cross-nationally. The authors examine how various strategies are associated with poverty rates across groups of women and also examine more directly the effects of specific work-family policies on poverty rates. They find that while family benefits and child care for young children unequivocally lower poverty rates, particularly for families headed by a single mother, long parental leaves have more ambivalent effects. The findings suggest that it is critical to examine the gendered assumptions underlying work-family policies rather than viewing all work-family policies as the same.

This article analyzes the incidence of social spending and taxation by income quintile for seven Latin American countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Absolute levels of social spending in Latin America are fairly flat across income quintiles, a pattern similar to that in the United States and differing from the more progressive pattern of spending in the United Kingdom. The structure of taxation in Latin America is also similar to that of the United States. Because of high income inequality in Latin America and the US, the rich bear of most the burden, whereas the United Kingdom taxes the middle class to a greater extent. The analysis suggests that many Latin American countries are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the rich resist the expansion of the welfare state (because they bear most of its tax burden without receiving commensurate benefits), and their opposition to its expansion in turn maintains long-term inequalities.

Britain and Germany have been experiencing significant changes in the nature of work and welfare since the 1990s. Although important differences have remained, there have been compelling indications of a dual transformation of welfare constituted not only by a farreaching retrenchment in unemployment insurance but also by a remarkable expansion in family policy. These developments have their functional underpinnings in accelerating deindustrialization with a declining proportion of the male workforce with specific skills as well as in service sector growth and rising female labor market participation characterized by an increase in general skills. As the aggregate effect of economic fluctuations in industrial production has diminished over time, the relative incidence of work disruptions which have arisen from maternity and child-rearing has increased substantially. This dual transformation in welfare and employment patterns suggests that the process of de-industrialization has initiated significant path adjustments unanticipated in the existing comparative political economy literature.

Following more than a decade of intense debate, the long-term care system in England may be on the verge of major change. We argue that the current system can be characterized as a residual system where care is free only to those who cannot afford to pay for themselves, with access heavily targeted to those with the highest levels of needs and with no informal care, and with substantial local variation in access and means-testing for home care. It is also characterized by a mixed economy of supply of care and a mixed economy of finance. The government Green Paper has proposed a major shift from diverse local systems to a new National Care Service, with a national entitlement to some public support for all those who are assessed as needing it. The government has also recently announced that it will make personal care at home free to those with the highest needs. If implemented, the proposals included in the Green Paper would, at minimum, introduce a ‘quasi-universal’ system, in which some level of assistance is provided to all those with eligible social care needs.

Jóléti államok: "elkötelezettek polgáraik anyagi és szellemi »jól-léte« (jó egészségi állapota, korszerő mőveltsége és a modern gazdaságban való foglalkoztathatósága, munkára való alkalmassága, továbbá megfelelı lakhatása és táplálkozása) iránt, és ennek érdekében aktívan beavatkoznak a gazdasági folyamatokba" (Szabó [2000] 209. o.). Típusai (Esping-Andersen [1999]): • Liberális: a rászorultság igazolásához kötött a segélyezés, szerény társadalombiztosítási programok, univerzális ellátások szők köre (angolszász államok: Egyesült Államok, Kanada, Ausztrália) • Állami-korporativista: lemondanak a piaci megoldásokról, a családi szolgáltatások fejletlenek, meghatározók a munkával kiérdemelt jogosultságok, nemek szerinti különbözı juttatásoknak nagy a szerepe (kontinentális országok: Franciaország, Németország, Olaszország, Ausztria) • Szociáldemokrata / univerzális: a legmagasabb szinten biztosít egyenlıséget, a szubszidiaritás helyett társadalmasítja a családi lét költségeit, elkötelezett a teljes foglalkoztatás mellett (Skandináv államok)

In this paper, we investigate cross-country differences in wage mobility in Europe using the European Community Household Panel. The paper is particularly focused on examining the impact of economic conditions, welfare state regimes and employment regulation on wage mobility. We apply a log-linear approach that is very much similar to a restricted multinomial logit model and much more flexible than

Despite there being common socio-demographic pressures across advanced industrialized countries, the public elder care programmes therein tend to vary. While the current literature on social care devotes itself to describing the care arrangements of each country and pigeonholing welfare/gender regime types, it does not sufficiently address this empirical puzzle. This study looks to specify the causal relationship between political institutions and public long-term care programmes. It argues that countries with personal-vote-oriented electoral systems and/or fragmented party systems have difficulties in developing universalistic public elder care programmes, whereas countries with party-vote-oriented electoral systems and cohesive party systems are likely to develop generous elder care programmes. For whilst the former types of political institutions prioritize patronage-based, particularistic benefits, the latter types encourage political actors to appeal to broader constituencies through universalistic welfare programmes. This study tests this claim by examining pooled time-series and cross-section data of advanced democracies, from 1980 until 2001. The empirical results suggest that politicians' reliance on personal votes and the fragmentation of ruling coalitions impede the expansion of public spending for elder care.

ANCIEN Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations European Network of Economic Policy Research Institutes THE ENGLISH LONG-TERM CARE SYSTEM ADELINA COMAS-HERRERA, LINDA PICKARD, RAPHAEL WITTENBERG, JULIETTE MALLEY AND DEREK KING, PERSONAL SOCIAL SERVICES RESEARCH UNIT, LSE HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS ENEPRI RESEARCH REPORT NO. 74 CONTRIBUTION TO WP 1 OF THE ANCIEN PROJECT MAY 2010 ENEPRI Research ...

Following more than a decade of intense debate, the long-term care system in England may be on the verge of major change. We argue that the current system can be characterized as a residual system where care is free only to those who cannot afford to pay for themselves, with access heavily targeted to those with the highest levels of needs and with no informal care, and with substantial local variation in access and means-testing for home care. It is also characterized by a mixed economy of supply of care and a mixed economy of finance. The government Green Paper has proposed a major shift from diverse local systems to a new National Care Service, with a national entitlement to some public support for all those who are assessed as needing it. The government has also recently announced that it will make personal care at home free to those with the highest needs. If implemented, the proposals included in the Green Paper would, at minimum, introduce a 'quasi-universal' system, in which some level of assistance is provided to all those with eligible social care needs.

This article analyses narrative stories used by the Chinese government to connect the problem of population ageing to welfare reform. The findings derived from semi-structural interviews and key policy documents suggest the unfolding of the narrative stories of power and stories of rising and stories of decline. The narrative stories in the developmental Chinese welfare state are diverse and stem from different processes than those for the mature European welfare states. The Narrative stories also vary for different policy areas. For inequality and health-care policies, under the master narrative of story of power, state depicts ‘stories of giving-to-give’ to support expansion in the traditional ‘old risk’ type of policies to main population, including the elderly. For long-term care, the power narrative of ’giving-to-shape’ legitimizes the expansionary reforms for a small group of deserving frail elderly. Behind this political framing of long-term care reform lies the story of decline that justifies the modest role of state provision in the organization of long-term care and leaves the responsibility for economic, social and spiritual wellbeing for the society itself. The story of decline in China also gravitates around sustainability of societies rather than around financial sustainability commonly underlining the political debate in the West.

Following more than a decade of intense debate, the long-term care system in England may be on the verge of major change. We argue that the current system can be characterized as a residual system where care is free only to those who cannot afford to pay for themselves, with access heavily targeted to those with the highest levels of needs and with no informal care, and with substantial local variation in access and means-testing for home care. It is also characterized by a mixed economy of supply of care and a mixed economy of finance. The government Green Paper has proposed a major shift from diverse local systems to a new National Care Service, with a national entitlement to some public support for all those who are assessed as needing it. The government has also recently announced that it will make personal care at home free to those with the highest needs. If implemented, the proposals included in the Green Paper would, at minimum, introduce a ‘quasi-universal’ system, in which some level of assistance is provided to all those with eligible social care needs.

This chapter examines the relationship between welfare states and migration from a critical political economy perspective, arguing that welfare states serve as repertoire of policy logics which are employed strategically in initial migrant admissions to serve specific selectivity goals and manage the wider policy context. By scrutinsing the relationship between labour migration policies (LMP) and welfare states in Germany and France, the chapter draws a comparative counterpoint to migration in the Scandinavian universal welfare state context.
From a welfare regime perspective economic utility rationales entailed in migration policies should coincide relatively smoothly with Bismarckian social insurance model and entitlement logics. While this claim seems valid at first glance, our empirical analysis exposes that different policy contexts in Germany and France trigger a highly variable usage, meaning and political contestation of Bismarckian entitlement logics. The German example showcases that Bismarckian pathways of 'deserved' and 'earned' socio-economic inclusion can be amplified in LMP in an environment where economic selectivity of migrant workers does not seem to clash with the norms of citizenship. In the French case, however, post-colonialism, Republican citizenship and related notions of belonging directly conflict with the attempt to use Bismarckian entitlement logics in labour admissions governance and explain the continued fierce political struggles over 'immigration choisie'.
The chapter thus indicates that the possibilities for what we label ‘governance of context’ are highly bounded. They are delimited by the political acceptability of re-constituting the very foundations of the citizenship model through LMP. Eventually, context does not just matter as a passive container within which policies operate; it is an active and constantly re-shaped component of political struggles over migration policymaking.

Responsible social policy in EU is developing and taking its place among other important commitments for member states. Paper analysis classic welfare state models stated for old EU member states and tries to identify Lithuania among them. Comparison and hierarchical cluster analysis results showed that Lithuania and other new member states still cannot be identified among old member states because of the high level of disparity in social policy and should be analyzed separately.

This paper uses data from 20 OECD countries to investigate the impact of welfare state institutions (especially employment protection, wage bargaining and work incentives) on the functioning of the labour market both theoretically and empirically. It shows that the impact of welfare state institutions is not as clear-cut as the deregulationists' view suggests. This result may be surprising against the background of the common view that welfare state measures cause European employment problems but it is in line with the outcomes of many other economic studies. The reasons for the ambiguous effects of welfare state institutions are manifold but the most important reason is the complexity of the impacts. There are many side-effects or second-round effects of welfare state institutions which, although often neglected, prove to be very important in the real ‘imperfect market’ world. Many welfare state institutions only have a clear-cut negative effect against the background of the th...

In this paper we aim to study and compare the countries of the former EU-15 in terms of the difference in labour market conditions between mothers and non-mothers and we look at how public policies can be designed in order to minimise the employment penalties associated with the presence of young children and thus promote parenthood by working women. As women choose to take part in paid employment, fertility rates will depend on their possibilities to combine employment and motherhood. As a result, the motherhood-induced employment penalties discussed in this paper as well as the role of public policies should be given priority attention by politicians and policy-makers. Firstly, in this paper we start out from a multinomial logit model to analyse motherhood-induced employment gaps in the EU-15. Then, various decomposition techniques (the method of recycled prediction and the Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) technique adapted to the non-linear case) are applied to the computed gross FTE employment gaps between mothers and non-mothers to isolate the net employment effect associated with the presence of children from that of differences in characteristics between mothers and non-mothers. Special attention is also given to the specific role of education to contain the negative labour market consequences that derive from the presence of young children. It seems that differences in characteristics such as age, education and non labour personal income do not influence a lot the difference in employment status. Secondly, we use an OLS regression to confront motherhood-induced employment penalties with selfconstructed country-specific indicators of child policies, used as explanatory variables, in order to test the impact and effectiveness of policies of different design and generosity on these employment gaps that separate mothers of young children from non-mothers and mothers with grown up children. We round off our analysis by presenting a new typology and country-specific overview of the adjustment mechanisms applied by career-pursuing mothers on the labour market as well as of the supportiveness of different child policies. In the conclusion, we carefully review the main results of this research, advance a number of policy recommendations and suggest interesting avenues for future research.