24. Welfare States and the Economy

Abstract

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 changes in demographic structures, particularly falling fertility rates and the decline of the traditional male breadwinner family that had been at the center of many welfare state programs. Finally, progress in research on distributive outcomes has been heavily driven by the greater availability of reliable and comparable data and new statistical techniques, specifically the Luxembourg Income Surveys and techniques for the analysis of unbalanced panel data.

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