Institutions, Structures and Poverty--A Comparative Study of 16 Countries, 1980-2000

Abstract

Most comparative welfare state research use data on panels of countries in order to increase the number of observations. Although such data contain variation in two dimensions, temporal and spatial, the former of these tends to be ignored. The purpose of this article is to try and explain both the temporal and the spatial variation of poverty rates in terms of social insurance indicators and structural/sociodemographic factors. The analyses suggest that structural change in terms of female labour force participation rate and the proportion of families with children primarily explains the temporal variation in poverty rates. The institutional social insurance factors primarily explain the spatial variation, i.e. variation between countries. In part also the temporal variation is explained by changes in welfare state generosity. However, the effects on temporal variation vary across time and it seems as if on average poverty rates during the 1980s were held back by increasing female labour force participation and decreasing family sizes, whereas during the 1990s poverty rates were upheld by welfare state retrenchments, primarily within the domain of unemployment insurance.

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