Welfare Reform on the Web (January 2004): Welfare State - Overseas
CHANGING PATTERNS OF SOCIAL PROTECTION
N. Gilbert and R.A. Van Voorhis
New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003
This book analyses emerging patterns in social welfare policies and the implications of these trends for the future protection of vulnerable groups in France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. Examining central government policy in these countries, contributors explore current reforms of mainline programmes: old age pensions, disability and unemployment insurance, family assistance, health care, and social services.
HOW TO COMBINE OPENNESS AND PROTECTION: CITIZENSHIP, MIGRATION AND WELFARE REGIMES
E. Engeben
Politics and Society, Vol. 31, 2003, p503-536
Discusses the challenges that increased immigration poses for West European Welfare States. Proposes a model in which immigrants would step-by-step over time, gain access to political rights and to the social protection system. Illustrates the model with examples taken from the Netherlands.
MODERN WELFARE STATES: SCANDINAVIAN POLITICS AND POLICY IN THE GLOBAL AGE
E.S. Einhorn and J. Logue
London: Praeger, 2003
This book looks at Scandinavian welfare systems in the era of globalisation. The Scandinavian Social Democratic model offered capitalism with a human face: a redistributive welfare state based on a privately owned market economy. Transfer payments and social services raised the living standards of the worst off to near middle class levels. There were plenty of strains - the tax burden was high, for example - but those strains were primarily internal to the individual Scandinavian State's system. However in the increasingly globalised economy this is no longer true. Finland and Sweden have joined the EU, immigration has increased and privatisation has become fashionable. The book questions whether Scandinavia can still be the Social Laboratory?
THE MORAL ECONOMY OF WELFARE STATES: BRITAIN AND GERMANY COMPARED
S. Mau
London: Routledge, 2003
The major focus of this book is the effect the moral dimension has on attitudes towards collective welfare arrangements. It uses the analysis of public policy and the study of popular attitudes to reveal the mixture of motives where self-interest as well as moral concerns play a part in the construction of a welfare state programme. For this comparative research two countries have been chosen, namely Great Britain and Germany. Germany represents the conservative and Great Britain the liberal model. The objective is to reveal the correspondence between welfare institutions and attitudinal stance, and to develop an understanding of how individual motives are conditioned by institutional settings, and how the logic of popular commitment to the collective welfare arrangements operates.