Maurizio Ferrera

The 'Southern Model' of Welfare in Social Europe:

This article tries to identify some common traits of the welfare states of Italy, Spain, Por tugal and Greece, with special attention to in stitutional and political aspects.

Home Ownership and the Welfare State: Is Southern Europe Different?

Abstract This article starts from the hypothesis that private expenditure on home ownership and public expenditure on aged pensions represent alternative and, to some extent, mutually exclusive mechanisms of life-time saving for old age. The paper identifies Greece, Italy and, to a lesser degree, Spain as being amongst the only advanced nations in which home ownership is extensive and social insurance age pensions extremely generous. The paper goes on to identify features of southern European society which make it possible to combine these features, but points to the fiscal and demographic problems that result from a policy-mix which privileges the old at the expense of the young.

Mending Nets in the South: Anti-poverty Policies in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain

The marginal role of social assistance and the absence of minimum income programmes have long been thought to constitute defining characteristics of the southern European model of welfare. Nevertheless, over the 1990s significant innovations in this field have taken place. The paper aims to contribute to the analysis of recent developments by critically examining the experience of anti-poverty policies in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. It is argued that the “patchiness” of safety nets in southern Europe is due to a unique set of constraints, the most relevant of which are the role of families and the “softness” of state institutions. A review of national profiles reveals that new policies introduced in all four countries mark progress towards redressing some of the historical imbalances of that welfare model. In particular, fully fledged minimum income schemes now operate in Portugal and in certain Spanish regions, while an experiment involving a number of Italian municipalities is still in progress. In spite of this, the paper concludes that social safety nets in southern Europe remain frail in terms of institutional design as well as political support and legitimacy.

The Four ‘Social Europes’: Between Universalism and Selectivity

In recent years the theme of ‘convergence’ of the social policies of western countries has gained a pre-eminent position in political and academic debates. It is not difficult to understand the reasons for this new interest. The literature on the crisis of welfare has amply revealed the similarity of the challenges that each country faces. These challenges are of an endogenous nature (like demographic changes or changes in the labour market), as well as of an exogenous nature (the so-called globalization of markets). If the challenges are analogous, it is natural to expect that the policy responses are, to a large extent, the same. Such an expectation should not necessarily depend on functionalist assumptions (common challenges of adaptation produce ‘equivalent’ responses). For it can also be based on the recognition that — at least within the OECD area — policy innovation occurs on the basis of increasingly swift and intense processes of diffusion and imitation among countries, via learning and lesson-drawing on an international scale (Rose, 1991).

European Integration and National Social Citizenship: Changing Boundaries, New Structuring?

The deepening of European integration has weakened the traditional coercive monopoly of the state on actors and resources that are crucial for the stability of redistributive institutions. The article explores these issues adopting a “state-building” perspective and drawing on Stein Rokkans pioneering insights on boundary building and internal structuring. The first part of the article briefly presents the theoretical perspective. The second part sketches the development of national welfare institutions up to the early 1970s, underlining the importance of bounding processes. The third part describes the challenges recently emerged to the “social sovereignty” of the nation-state largely linked to European integration. The final part offers some more speculative remarks on the changing architecture of social protection, with some hints at cross-national variations and possible developments at the European Union level.

The European Welfare State: Golden Achievements, Silver Prospects

For the welfare state the last 30 years have witnessed a turbulent transition from the ‘Golden Age’ of expansion to a ‘Silver Age’ of permanent austerity. This shift has been the result of external pressures and of internal transformations of domestic economies and social structures. Permanent austerity has entailed incisive institutional adaptations and has been accompanied by a ‘new politics’, centred on a plurality of ‘blame avoidance’ strategies on the side of parties and governments. The article summarises and discusses the main factual developments since the mid-1970s but it also surveys the main strands of academic debates on both the expansion and the crisis phases. The author argues that comparative welfare state research has been one of the liveliest fields of political economy – a field marked by important analytical and theoretical advances and by the accumulation of relevant and systematic empirical knowledge about a key institution of the European political landscape.

The future of the European “social model” in the global economy

Abstract This article examines the prospects for European welfare states in the context of globalization. It begins with a critical review of the globalization arguments. While there is some evidence that external constraints make life harder for policymakers seeking positive‐sum outcomes, it is the combination of national debt and spending limits, plus domestic tax resistance, that really count in making expenditure‐based social and employment policies more difficult in certain countries. In understanding the constraints and opportunities that will shape Europes welfare future, globalization—crudely understood—is therefore much less influential than many suppose. While EMU has radically diminished national autonomy in exchange rate, monetary policy, and fiscal policy, there are also beneficial consequences for social policy and broader economic management. On the employment and social policy side, initiatives required to match greater “flexibility” with sustained security are now at the top of the EU agenda, and mechanisms for diffusing best practice across Europe are being put in place. Within this framework, European welfare states must place more emphasis on “dynamic equality,” being primarily attentive to the worst off, more hospitable to incentive‐generating differentiation, and actively vigilant with regard to the “openness” of opportunity structures.

*The Jcms Annual Lecture: National Welfare States and European Integration: In Search of a Virtuous Nesting

In recent years the EU has been witnessing a growing tension between the logic of closure, which underpins national welfare systems, and the logic of opening, which guides the integration process, especially in the economic sphere. Are there ways of mitigating such tension, in order to avoid negative consequences in terms of performance and legitimacy? The article outlines a strategy of institutional reconciliation between the two logics, based on a more explicit and effective nesting of the nation-based welfare state within the overall spatial architecture of the Union. While recognizing the important role played by free movement and competition rules, this nesting strategy entails the strengthening of an EU social space, capable of safeguarding the closure preconditions for multi-level social sharing arrangements.

The uncertain future of the Italian welfare state

The Italian model of welfare is characterised by numerous imbalances, including an uneven distribution of protection and costs, and a chronic deficit between contributions and outlays. There is also a widespread abuse of the rules governing contributions and benefits and a persisting inefficiency in public services. The failure to resolve this crisis has contributed to the erosion of Italys social and political consensus, producing a ‘tax‐welfare’ backlash and a new territorial cleavage in welfare politics.

Recasting European Welfare States for the 21st Century

This article places European welfare states squarely in todays European integration context and looks optimistically at social policy perspectives ‘top down’ from the European level. It has the needs of European policy makers in mind, and thus their interests in optimal policy mixes, lessons from national experiences and in a new institutional architecture that links EU member states more effectively into All-European corridors of reform efforts. The authors argue that the overriding need in welfare state reform is to identify new value combinations and institutional arrangements in national systems that are both mixed – in terms of solidarity and growth objectives – and virtuous, that is capable of producing advances on all necessary fronts. The authors recapitulate the EUs present social agenda – where the search for ‘new value combinations’ is seen to be most actively undertaken. They take up the nature of the ‘bottom up’ challenges to, and the adjustment problems of, the four different sets of European welfare states at length and also their differing needs for functional, distributive as well as normative re-calibration. They present core components of an optimal adjustment strategy that could reconcile growth with solidarity. Finally, they focus on different instruments that might further substantiate the role the EU could play in preserving and developing the ‘European Social Model’ in different welfare domains.