Who's afraid of the welfare state now?
Loading...
Files
Book_cover_2023_Hemerijck.jpg (16.4 KB)
Book cover (2024)
License
Cadmus Permanent Link
Full-text via DOI
ISSN
Issue Date
Type of Publication
Keyword(s)
LC Subject Heading
Other Topic(s)
EUI Research Cluster(s)
Initial version
Published version
Succeeding version
Preceding version
Published version part
Earlier different version
Initial format
Author(s)
Citation
New York : Oxford University Press, 2024
Cite
HEMERIJCK, Anton, MATSAGANIS, Manos, Who’s afraid of the welfare state now?, New York : Oxford University Press, 2024 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76975
Abstract
This book primarily explores the welfare-policy responses to the Great Recession, reform trajectories that swept across Europe over the last decade, with a final chapter that focuses on Covid-19 welfare management. The 2008 crash marked a critical stress test for European welfare states with dramatic repercussions, including a massive surge in unemployment, a widening in wage and income disparities, and rising poverty. Hikes in fiscal deficits and public debt, required to pre-empt an economic meltdown, forced policymakers to make painful cuts in welfare services to shore up public finances, thereby jeopardizing welfare support for vulnerable groups. The overall scope of welfare-policy responses is heterogeneous, disparate, and uneven. In some cases, the response to the Great Recession was accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in others unpopular crisis-management measures received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions, and employer organizations. Alongside serious retrenchments, there have been assertive attempts to rebuild social programmes and institutions, to accommodate policy repertoires-not merely domestically but also at the EU level-to the new realities of the knowledge economy and an ageing society. Overall, the long 2010s showed that the future of work and welfare is in our hands: it is perfectly possible to shape this future in such a way as to provide inclusive social security, achieve high employment, advance and maintain human capabilities across the life-course, and fight poverty and inequality.
Table of Contents
-- 1: The welfare state's resolve -- 2: Welfare performance over the long 2010s -- 3: Welfare performance over the long 2010s -- 4: Buffering the Great Recession and the eurozone crisis -- 5: Under the spell of austerity: welfare reform across Europe between 2008 and 2014 -- 6: Fostering resilience: Welfare policy change across Europe between 2015 and 2019 -- 7: The legacy of the eurozone crisis -- 8: Social Europe in a bind, no more? -- 9: Towards a social compass for inclusive and sustainable growth
Additional Information
Published online: 11 March 2024