Joakim Palme

The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality: Welfare State Institutions, Inequality and Poverty in the Western Countries

The debates on how to reduce poverty and inequality have focused on two controversial questions. One is whether social policies should be targeted to low- income groups or universal; another whether benefits should be equal for all or earnings-related. Traditional arguments in favor of targeting and flat-rate benefits, focusing on the distribution of the money actually transferred, have neglected three policy-relevant considerations: 1. The size of redistributive budgets is not fixed but reflects the structure of welfare state institutions. 2. there tends to be a tradeoff between the degree of low-income targeting and the size of redistributive budgets. 3. Outcomes of market-based distribution are often even more unequal than those of earnings-related social insurance programs. We argue that social insurance institutions are of central importance for redistributive outcomes. using new data bases, our comparative analyses of the effects of different institutional types of welfare states on poverty and inequality indicate that institutional differences lead to unexpected outcomes and generate the paradox of redistribution: The more we target benefits at the poor and the more concerned we are with creating equality via equal public transfers to all, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality.

New Politics and Class Politics in the Context of Austerity and Globalization: Welfare State Regress in 18 Countries, 1975–95

The relevance of socioeconomic class and of class-related parties for policymaking is a recurring issue in the social sciences. The “new politics” perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new interest groups of welfare-state clients capable of largely resisting retrenchment pressures emanating from postindustrial forces. We argue that retrenchment can fruitfully be analyzed as distributive conflict involving a remaking of the early postwar social contract based on the full employment welfare state, a conflict in which partisan politics and welfare-state institutions are likely to matter. Pointing to problems of conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable in previous research, we bring in new data on the extent of retrenchment in social citizenship rights and show that the long increase in social rights has been turned into a decline and that significant retrenchment has taken place in several countries. Our analyses demonstrate that partisan politics remains significant for retrenchment also when we take account of contextual indictors, such as constitutional veto points, economic factors, and globalization.Author names are in alphabetical order and they share equal responsibility for the manuscript. Early versions of this paper were presented at annual meetings of the Nordic Political Science Association in Aalborg, 2002, and the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 28 meeting in Mannheim, 2001, the International Sociological Association RC 19 meeting in Tilburg 2000, and the American Sociological Association in Washington, DC, 2000, as well as at various seminars. For constructive comments on different versions of the manuscript we thank Rainer Lepsius, Anders Lindbom, Ingalill Montanari, John Myles, Michael Shalev, Sheila Shaver, and Robin Stryker, as well as other participants in these meetings. We want to thank Olof Bäckman, Stefan Englund, Ingrid Esser, Helena Höög, and Annita Näsström for very valuable help and Dennis Quinn for providing us his data on international financial deregulation. Our thanks are also due to three anonymous referees for careful reading. This research has been supported by grants from the Bank of Sweden Tercentennial Foundation and the Swedish Council for Social Research.

The role of welfare state principles and generosity in social policy programmes for public health: an international comparative study

BACKGROUND Many important social determinants of health are also the focus for social policies. Welfare states contribute to the resources available for their citizens through cash transfer programmes and subsidised services. Although all rich nations have welfare programmes, there are clear cross-national differences with respect to their design and generosity. These differences are evident in national variations in poverty rates, especially among children and elderly people. We investigated to what extent variations in family and pension policies are linked to infant mortality and old-age excess mortality. METHODS Infant mortality rates and old-age excess mortality rates were analysed in relation to social policy characteristics and generosity. We did pooled cross-sectional time-series analyses of 18 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries during the period 1970-2000 for family policies and 1950-2000 for pension policies. FINDINGS Increased generosity in family policies that support dual-earner families is linked with lower infant mortality rates, whereas the generosity in family policies that support more traditional families with gainfully employed men and homemaking women is not. An increase by one percentage point in dual-earner support lowers infant mortality by 0.04 deaths per 1000 births. Generosity in basic security type of pensions is linked to lower old-age excess mortality, whereas the generosity of earnings-related income security pensions is not. An increase by one percentage point in basic security pensions is associated with a decrease in the old age excess mortality by 0.02 for men as well as for women. INTERPRETATION The ways in which social policies are designed, as well as their generosity, are important for health because of the increase in resources that social policies entail. Hence, social policies are of major importance for how we can tackle the social determinants of health.

Social policy and economic development in the Nordic countries

List of Tables List of Figures Notes on Contributors Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Social Policy and Economic Development in the Nordic Countries: An Introduction O.Kangas & J.Palme Coming Late - Catching Up: The Formation of a Nordic Model O.Kangas & J.Palme Voluntary State-Subsidized Social Insurance in the Advanced Industrialized World Since the 1890s: The Nordic Experience in Comparative Perspective E.Carroll Empowering Social Policy: The Role of Social Care Services in Modern Welfare States A.Anttonen Family Policy and Cross-National Patterns of Poverty T.Ferrarini & K.Forssen Education and Equal Life-Chances: Investing in Children G.Esping-Andersen Fighting Health and Income: One Important Road to Welfare and Development J.Fritzell & O.Lundberg Does the Welfare State Harm Economic Growth? Sweden as a Strategic Test Case W.Korpi Growth and Employment in the Nordic Welfare State in the 1990s: Crisis and Revival J.Kiander How to Maintain a Big Tax Welfare State? O.Sjoeberg The Nordic Model of the Information Society: The Finnish Case P.Himanen Does the Most Brilliant Future of the Nordic Model have to be in the Past? O.Kangas & J.Palme Index

Welfare trends in Sweden: balancing the books for the 1990s

Welfare trends in Sweden: balancing the books for the 1990s : Journal of European Social Policy

TOWARDS A EUROPEAN SOCIAL MODEL?: Trends in social insurance among EU countries 1980–2000

ABSTRACT The market-enhancing regulations of the European Union (EU) place political and economic constraints on the Member States. This has been expected to induce convergence of social policies, generally in a downward direction. At the same time the notion of a European Social Model has been launched as a strategy to make marketization socially acceptable, pointing to a development in a different direction. This paper examines key aspects of the development of the main social insurance programs during the period 1980–2000 in 14 EU Member States. Are there significant signs of convergence in the replacement rates of social insurance programs and do broader development trends of the social insurance systems indicate converging institutional models? The results indicate divergence rather than convergence of social insurance replacement rates. In terms of institutional models there is no evidence of a common European Social Model in the area of social insurance over the past decades.

Social citizenship rights and social insurance replacement rate validity : pitfalls and possibilities

The comparative analysis of welfare states has been greatly advanced by rights-based measurements of social provisions. Social insurance replacement rates have figured prominently here. Apparently, there is considerable confusion about the validity of replacement rates and their comparability across different datasets. The purpose of this study is to outline a refined institutional perspective in the comparative analysis of welfare states focusing on the character of social citizenship rights. We show that social insurance replacement rates from different datasets differ in their underlying theoretical framework for policy analysis and therefore capture different aspects of how welfare states secure the livelihood of citizens in periods of work incapacity. Analysing validity solely on the basis of replacement rate point estimates is therefore misleading. We show that the close focus on social citizenship rights and programmatic design in the Social Citizenship Indicator Programme (SCIP) carries great potential for causal welfare state analysis.

Convergence Pressures and Responses: Recent Social Insurance Development in Modern Welfare States

Pressures from global market forces along with austerity and retrenchment have generated predictions of converging welfare state institutions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of social insurance programs among 18 of the economically most advanced democracies during 1980–2000. Have social insurance rights converged and have changes been of such a character that we can discern converging trends of social insurance models? The results indicate convergence in the replacement rates, coverage and employer financing of social insurance benefits up to 1980, after which these signs of convergence tend to disappear or transform into divergence. Rather than countries becoming reclassified, changes implemented in social insurance rights appear to have strengthened the distinctive characteristics of social insurance models identified.

Coming Late — Catching Up: The Formation of a ‘Nordic Model’

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historical and comparative framework for the discussion of contemporary social policy developments in the Nordic countries. Present reforms and policy trends illustrate dilemmas for social policy that are common to many countries, and some of the reforms can be seen as alternative strategies to deal with the dilemmas. The relevance of the Scandinavian case for the discussion of different alternative social policy approaches in other parts of the world should be seen in relation to the fact that the Scandinavian model is seen as an ‘ideal type’. Its merits, as well as its drawbacks, deserve to be taken seriously.

Social Policy and Economic Development in the Nordic Countries: An Introduction

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed major transformations of economic systems around the world. The first was the creation of capitalist markets in the Western hemisphere. The second was the transition from capitalism to socialism in several countries. The third was the transition in the reverse direction: from centrally planned command systems back to market-based economies. The new globalization of business attached to an explosive expansion of information technologies (ITs) and the rapid IT-based industrialization of the Asian economies may constitute a fourth great transformation that will change the economic order of the globe. During such great transformations, there are always winners and losers. In the wake of such changes, old forms of security vanish and new ones take shape. A crucial issue here is how destructive or constructive change actually becomes. In a Schumpeterian sense, we can speak about a ‘constructive destruction’ (Schumpeter 1950). This term refers to a situation where old, inefficient forms of social activities are destroyed and replaced by more efficient and better systems. An interesting question is how and to what extent different countries, or groups of countries, have managed to harness the destruction, in a socially justifiable way, and to create social and economic institutions that can effectively utilize the potentials and possibilities the new situation creates. How can the Nordic experience be interpreted in this perspective?