Un nuevo equilibrio de bienestar

From both a quantity and quality perspective, children occupy centre-stage in any welfare equilibrium. Very low fertility does not correspond to citizens’ desires and will, in the long haul, have dire societal consequences. Insufficient investment in the quality of our children will adversely affect their life chances as adults and will also harm our economic well-being. Children are a collective asset and the cost of having children is rising, in particular as women embrace the norm of life-long employment. The double challenge is to eliminate the constraints on having children in the first place, and to ensure that the children we have are ensured optimal opportunities. In the following I analyze the twin challenges of fertility and child development. I then examine which kind of policy mix will ensure both the socially desired level of fertility and investment in our children. The task is to identify a Paretian optimum that will ensure efficiency and social equity gains simultaneously

The Role of Social Institutions in Inter-Generational Mobility

The primary goal of inter-generational mobility (IGM) research has always been to explain how and why social origins influence peoples’ life chances. This has naturally placed family attributes at centre stage. But the role of social institutions, most notably education systems, as a mediating factor has also been central to IGM theory. Indeed, generations of stratification research were premised on the core assumption that equalizing access to education would weaken the impact of social origins. In theory, policies, institutions, as well as macro-economic and historical context, have been identified as crucial in shaping patterns of social mobility (D’Addio, 2007). But apart from education, empirical research has contributed little concrete evidence on how this occurs.

Gordon Brown's misplaced Smithian appeal : the eclipse of sympathy in changing British welfare norms

Gordon Brown has eagerly lauded his fellow Kirkcaldy citizen, Adam Smith, as his main policy inspiration. This article tests the rigour of such a claim by matching Brown's promotion of Smithian ‘sympathy’ as the centrepiece of his programme for government with the changes introduced by his Treasury to the British welfare model. In the 1970s, Thomas Wilson showed that the traditions of the post-war British welfare state were compatible with a modified form of Smithian sympathy socialised at the level of the state. New Labour has set about reforming the welfare model with respect to both its underlying institutions and the basic subjectivities of its recipients. I show that Brown's substantive preference for an asset-based system of welfare moves those subjectivities away from the ‘relational self’ of Smithian sympathy and towards a much more ‘autonomous self’. Consequently, I conclude that it is stretching Smith's concept of sympathy too far, even in a modified socialised form, to associate it with New Labour's asset-based system of welfare

After the Golden Age: The future of the welfare state in the new global order

The advanced welfare state, which became one of the hallmarks of the "Golden Age" of post-war prosperity, implied more than a mere upgrading of existing social policies in the developed industrial world. In the broadest of terms, it represented an effort to bring about economic, moral and political reconstruction. Economically, it departed from the orthodoxies of the pure market nexus and required the extension of income and employment security as a right of citizenship. Morally, it sought to defend the ideas of social justice, solidarity and universalism. Politically, the welfare state formed part of a project of nation building, affirming liberal democracy against the twin perils of fascism and bolshevism. Many countries became self-proclaimed welfare states, not so much to give a label to their social policies as to foster national social integration. In today's globally integrated open economies, however, many of the assumptions that guided post-war welfare state construction in the advanced industrial world seem no longer to obtain. Non-inflationary demand-led growth within one country now appears impossible; services rather than manufacturing must assure full employment; the population is rapidly aging; the conventional family, relying on the male breadwinner, is in decline; and the life course is both changing and diversifying. Such structural shifts challenge traditional social policy thinking

Mechanisms of Spontaneous Current Generation in an Inhomogeneous d-Wave Superconductor

A boundary between two d-wave superconductors or an s-wave and a d-wave superconductor generally breaks time-reversal symmetry and can generate spontaneous currents due to proximity effect. On the other hand, surfaces and interfaces in d-wave superconductors can produce localized current-carrying states by supporting the T-breaking combination of dominant and subdominant order parameters. We investigate spontaneous currents in the presence of both mechanisms and show that at low temperature, counter-intuitively, the subdominant coupling decreases the amplitude of the spontaneous current due to proximity effect. Superscreening of spontaneous currents is demonstrated to be present in any d-d (but not s-d) junction and surface with d+id' order parameter symmetry. We show that this supercreening is the result of contributions from the local magnetic moment of the condensate to the spontaneous current.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, RevTe

Defamilisation Measures and Women’s Labour Force Participation – A Comparative Study of Twelve Countries

This paper examines the relevance of two interpretations of defamilisation (“freedom of the family” and “freedom of women from the family”) to the search for effective measures for strengthening women's participation in the paid labour market. Based on these two interpretations, two types of defamilisation measures (care-focused and women's economic) are identified. Two defamilisation indices are developed respectively covering twelve countries. The importance of the two types of defamilisation measures in assisting women to access employment are discussed from two angles. The input angle refers to the extent to which countries are committed to the provision of these defamilisation measures. The output angle is about the relationship between these defamilisation measures and the degree of women's participation in the paid labour market. Through conducting these analytical tasks, this paper also contributes to the examination of the relationship between types of welfare regimes and the provision of defamilisation measures

Household composition across the new Europe: Where do the new Member States fit in?

In this paper we present indicators of household structure for 26 of the 27 countries of the post-enlargement European Union. As well as broad indicators of household type, we present statistics on single-person and extended-family households, and on the households of children and older people. Our main aim is to assess the extent to which household structure differs between the "old" and "new" Member States of the European Union. We find that most of the Eastern European countries may be thought of as lying on the same North-North-Western-Southern continuum defined for the "old" EU Member States, and constituting an "extreme form" of the Southern European model of living arrangements, which we term the "Eastern" model. However, the Baltic states do not fit easily onto this continuum

Assessing the performance of social spending in Europe

Based on the construction of a new composite index to assess the relative performance of welfare policies, we show that the variability of performances cannot be explained only by the amount of resources devoted to social policies, but also by its composition: countries with higher shares of social public expenditure, specifically aimed at reducing income concentration, obtain better results. This associates the traditional classification of the welfare systems to the performance obtained in the social sector

Two decades of change in Europe: The emergence of the social investment state

Since the late 1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the 'social investment strategy'. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but there are significant national distinctions and regime specific trajectories. We discuss some caveats, focusing on the question whether the new policy paradigm has been established at the expense of social policies that mitigate poverty and inequality. © 2012 Cambridge University Press

The role of European welfare states in intergenerational monetary transfers: a micro-level perspective

This article uses a comprehensive theoretical framework to explain why parents send money to particular children, and examines whether intergenerational solidarity is shaped by spending on various welfare domains or provisions as a percentage of gross domestic product. The theoretical model at the level of parents and children distinguishes parental resources and children’s needs as the factors most likely to influence intergenerational money transfers. Differences in state spending on various welfare domains are then used to hypothesise in which countries children with specific needs are most likely to receive a transfer. For parents we hypothesise in which countries parents with specific available resources are most likely to send a transfer. We use data from the first wave of the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to analyse the influence of welfare-state provisions on the likelihood of intergenerational transfers in ten European countries. The results indicate that, in line with our expectations, the likelihood of a transfer being made is the outcome of an intricate resolution of the resources (ability) of the parents and the needs of a child. Rather large differences between countries in money transfers were found. The results suggest that, at least with reference to cross-generational money transfers, no consistent differences by welfare state regime were found.