Performance and Efficiency of the Welfare State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Pestieau ◽  
Mathieu Lefebvre
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Private Firms ◽  
Administrative Cost ◽  
Public Provider ◽  
The Welfare State

One of the most widespread critiques levelled against the welfare state is its inefficiency. In this chapter we try to tackle the question of definition and measurement of the efficiency and the performance of the welfare state. We show that there exist clear inefficiencies in the distribution of services. Because of administrative complexity or fear of stigmatization, the neediest people can fall outside the protection of the welfare state. As far as the administrative cost of social insurance, a single public provider tends to be cheaper than a multiplicity of private firms. In the production of some services, there are clear efficiency slacks, but these do not depend on ownership—public or private. What seems to matter is competition and autonomy. Finally, we study the performance of the welfare state as a whole, abstracting from social spending. The results indicate a clear process of convergence among European countries.

scholarly journals INCOME INEQUALITY, MOBILITY, AND THE WELFARE STATE: A POLITICAL ECONOMY MODEL

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 1198-1226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Bossi ◽  
Gulcin Gumus
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Overlapping Generations ◽  
Tax Rates ◽  
Overlapping Generations Model ◽  
Public Programs ◽  
Transfer Payments ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Welfare State

In this paper, we set up a three-period stochastic overlapping-generations model to analyze the implications of income inequality and mobility for demand for redistribution and social insurance. We model the size of two different public programs under the welfare state. We investigate bidimensional voting on the tax rates that determine the allocation of government revenues among transfer payments and old-age pensions. We show that the coalitions formed, the resulting political equilibria, and the demand for redistribution crucially depend on the level of income inequality and mobility.

scholarly journals The development of the Welfare State in Portugal: trends in social expenditure between 1938 and 2003

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Fernando Carolo ◽  
José António Pereirinha
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Data Series ◽  
Social Risk ◽  
Social Expenditure ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Risk Protection ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis paper presents a data series on social expenditure in Portugal for the period 1938-2003. The series was built with the aim of identifying and characterizing the most significant phases in the process leading up to the current welfare state system in this country. The establishment of a social insurance (Previdência) in 1935 was one of the founding pillars of the Estado Novo (New State). Reforms to Social Welfare (Previdência Social) in 1962, while in the full throes of the New State, policy measures taken after the revolution of 1974 and a new orientation for social policy following the accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC) in the mid-1980s brought about significant transformations in the institutional organizational structure that provided welfare and conferred social rights in Portugal. To understand this process, knowledge is needed of the transformations to the institutional structures governing the organizations that provided welfare, welfare coverage in terms of the type of benefit and the population entitled to social risk protection, the magnitude of spending on benefits associated with these risks, as well as how benefits were allocated between the institutions. We built a data series for the period 1938-1980, which can then be matched to data already published in the OECD Social Expenditure Database from 1980 onwards. As a result, a consistent series for social expenditure from 1938 to 2003 was obtained. The methodology used to create the series enabled us to measure the impact of the variation in population coverage for social risks and the average generosity of benefits on the relative share of social expenditure in GDP. We present an interpretive reading for the full period, covering the New State and the Democracy from 1974, of the process of building the welfare state in Portugal.

Who Loves the Swedish Welfare State? Attitude Trends 1980–2010

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Svallfors
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Willingness To Pay ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Public Organization ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Degree Of Stability ◽  
The Welfare State

Attitudes toward social spending, collective financing, and public organization, willingness to pay taxes, suspicion about welfare abuse, and trust in the task performance of the welfare state show a large degree of stability in Sweden, and where change is registered, it tends to go in the direction of increasing support. More people state their willingness to pay higher taxes for welfare policy purposes; more people want collective financing of welfare policies; and fewer people perceive extensive welfare abuse. Class patterns change so that the salaried and the self-employed become more similar to workers in their attitudes. Hence, no attitudinal corrosive effects from increased marketization of the Swedish welfare state can be detected on public support for welfare policies.

The Beginnings of the Nordic Welfare States: Similarities and Differences

1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 9-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stein Kuhnle
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Compulsory Insurance ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Welfare State

The beginning of our present stage in the development of the welfare state can be traced to Bismarck's large-scale social insurance schemes of the 1880s. The article compares various political and economic macro-characteristics of the Nordic countries at that time, and proposes hypotheses about the timing of legislation in the Nordic nations, and about the likelihood for Nordic imitations of the principle of compulsory insurance. The article discusses why Denmark was expected to become, and in fact became, a forerunner in the Nordic context, and why the principle of compulsory insurance stood a better chance of gaining acceptance in Norway than in Denmark and Sweden.

The influence of the welfare state on the number of young old persons

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHRIN KOMP ◽  
THEO VAN TILBURG ◽  
MARJOLEIN BROESE VAN GROENOU
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
Retirement Age ◽  
Old People ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Country Differences ◽  
Southern European Countries ◽  
Young Old ◽  
The Welfare State

ABSTRACTMany current discussions of welfare state reforms focus on the ‘young old’, a group now generally perceived as healthy people past retirement age without a legal responsibility for dependent persons in need of care. For the welfare state, they constitute a resource whose activities are hard to steer. This article focuses on the influence of the welfare state on the number of ‘young old’ people. It describes different ways in which the welfare state influences the number of young old persons, and investigates whether variations in the regulations for the ages of normal, early and late retirement are the prime cause. The paper also estimates the share of the young old among those aged 50–90 years in 10 European countries in 2004 using comparable survey data. These shares ranged between 36 and 49 per cent for men and between 35 and 52 per cent for women. High shares were found in continental European countries, and low shares in Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom. The shares in southern European countries varied among the countries and by gender. To explain the variations in the share, country differences in retirement regulations proved helpful but insufficient. When the overall influence of the welfare state on the share of young old persons in the population was analysed, a country-characteristic pattern emerged.

Great Recession, great regression? The welfare state in the twenty-first century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia Lessa Kerstenetzky ◽  
Graciele Pereira Guedes
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Public Expenditure ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Tax Burden ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
Stable Performance ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract Has the welfare state undergone significant retrenchment in the aftermath of the 2007–08 crackdown? In the literature, two contrasting views can be found. Some commentators argue that expansions that would otherwise be observed during crises have been suffocated due to the imperative of austerity. Other more optimistic assessments see social investment policies as having been experimented with in various places, alongside widespread retrenchment. In this paper, using an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) database for 35 countries, we check these assessments by examining aggregate figures, such as the evolution—over the 2007–13 period—of social spending and its composition, the participation of social spending in public expenditure, the tax burden and tax composition and welfare state effectiveness. We document expansion in the OECD area alongside stable performance. However, important challenges persist.

Home Ownership, Social Insurance, and the Welfare State

2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalton Conley ◽  
Brian Gifford
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Home Ownership ◽  
The Welfare State

The Break-Up of the Poor Laws— German Style: Progressivism and the Origins of the Welfare State, 1900–1918

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 981-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Frohman
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Social Security Systems ◽  
Security Systems ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Welfare State

While the 1834 New Poor Law and the controversies over its reform represent one of the central threads in every narrative of the history of modern Britain, the same can hardly be said of the German poor laws, whose history is far less known. This is due in large part to a historiographical tradition that sees the Bismarckian social insurance programs as the fons et origo of the German welfare state and thus marginalizes all forms of social assistance that can not be neatly fitted into the narrative pre-history or subsequent development of these programs. This contrasts with a British tradition where, as E. P. Hennock has recently argued, national insurance was primarily conceived as a means of poor law reform, and where the poor laws figure prominently in the historiography of the welfare state. On the other hand, this insurance-centered approach to the welfare state is not entirely to blame because, for their part, historians of poor relief have not been able to establish any positive connections between individualized, subsidiary, deterrent relief and social insurance or social security systems based on rights deriving from either contributions or citizenship.

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