Recalibrating Europe’s Welfare Regimes

Abstract

Abstract In a well-known series of volumes on European welfare states published in the mid-1980s, Peter Flora coined the metaphor of’growth to limits’ (Flora 1986). This notion contained an institutional diagnosis of the social policy predicament which afflicted the Old Continent: the ambitious programs introduced during the trente glorieuses had come to (quasi–full) maturation and were therefore reaching their maximum extension in terms of coverage and generosity. While the realization of the ‘golden’ commitments of the past meant invaluable material advances for large masses of the population, growth to limits was causing a number of worrying budgetary and institutional strains: mounting public debts and deficits, the accrual of ‘automatic’ entitlements often treated as property rights, a gradual loss of overall policy flexibility, and so on (Ferrera 1998a).

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