scholarly journals The Welfare State in Transition Economies and Accession to the EU

2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-urgen Wagener
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Transition Economies ◽  
The Eu ◽  
The Welfare State

Accelerator or Brake?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ferrera
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Grass Root ◽  
Grass Root Level ◽  
Domestic Level ◽  
The Eu ◽  
The Welfare State

Reorienting the welfare state towards social investment constitutes a complex and multidimensional challenge of policy recalibration and raises daunting political problems. The chapter analyses the strategy pursued by the EU, with a view to assessing its degree of ‘conduciveness’ to social investment recalibration at the domestic level. It is argued that the EU has indeed stimulated policy change, but that its potential as a social investment facilitator has been hamstrung by a number of weaknesses and shortcomings, especially on the discursive front. A more convinced and articulated endorsement of the social investment paradigm and a more focused attention to ‘capacity’ at the subnational and grass-root level should be the fronts to prioritize.

scholarly journals The Disassembly of the Greek Welfare State under the Troika

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-232
Author(s):  
Yianni Tsesmelis
Keyword(s):  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
High Water ◽  
Greek Population ◽  
Individual Member ◽  
Political Interaction ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Eu ◽  
The Welfare State

Having broken from half a century of binary political choice between Greece's two established political parties, SYRIZA's rise to power in the 2010s represented an opportunity for the country's welfare state to resist intrusions by European entities and institutions. This paper analyses Greece’s history and political interaction during this period, arguing that Greece has now, in folding to the EU, completed its transition from a relatively liberally-spending welfare state to what Wolfgang Streeck calls a “consolidation state.” Relevant to this analysis is a set of historical details leading up to the SYRIZA election and the 2015 referendum—seen as the high-water mark of opposition to austerity and cuts to the welfare state. In turn, the impact of austerity on the Greek population is quantified and substantiated, demonstrating that austerity measures predominately impacted the welfare state, more often than not resulting in direct reductions to pension and other monetary payments to the citizenry. Finally, these factual conditions are squared with theoretical descriptions and conceptualisations of the welfare state as existing under neoliberalism. Ultimately, what can be drawn from this research is that Europe's institutions are unyielding in their prioritisation of an ordoliberal, single-market ideology over individual Member States’ varying conceptions of locally implemented fiscal policy. Keywords: Austerity; Consolidation state; Neoliberalism; Ordoliberalism; Referendum; Welfare state; SYRIZA

scholarly journals Cross-border Movement of Patients in the eu: A Re-Appraisal

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clemens M. Rieder
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
European Court ◽  
Specific Dimension ◽  
National Welfare ◽  
The Eu ◽  
The Welfare State ◽  
Cross Border Movement

Abstract The national welfare state, so it seems, has come under attack by European integration. This article focuses on one facet of the welfare state, that is, healthcare and on one specific dimension, that is, cross-border movement of patients. The institution which has played a pivotal role in the development of the framework regulating the migration of patients is the European Court of Justice (ecj). The Court’s activity in this sensitive area has not remained without critics. This was even more so since the Court invoked Treaty (primary) law which not only has made it difficult to overturn case law but also has left the legislator with very little room for manoeuvre in relation to any future (secondary) eu law. What is therefore of special interest in terms of legitimacy is the legal reasoning by which the Court has made its contribution to the development of this framework. This article is a re-appraisal of the legal development in this field.

scholarly journals The happiness gap in the EU strategy: the globalization goals

2019 ◽  
Vol XXII (1) ◽  
pp. 177-183
Author(s):  
Frecea G. L.
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Economic Effects ◽  
Complex Case ◽  
Eu Member States ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Models ◽  
The Eu ◽  
The Welfare State

This paper will outline the EU member states characteristics in the globalization context, following a comparative analysis of the welfare state models from a social perspective. This approach was structured starting from the human resources involvement in all spheres of life, from economic to moral field, requiring an adjusted sense of global citizenship, private and public responsibility. Assuming that the social development is a key issue in the globalization process, the labour force being in the same time both the architects and the passive victims of its composition, the global extension will be considered in accordance with the economic effects of migration, the human development index trend and the demographic considerations. The present paper proposes a complex case study on the European social models in order to provide a link between the social integration and the global benefits, emphasizing in the same time the major losers of the global change. The main results of the analysis strengthen the positive impact of a well-balanced link established between CSR and the state responsibility, identifying also the deficiencies of sharing a common EU agenda that supports the financial returns without a clear focus on the component people in the welfare state dynamism.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Regulating for Welfare: Regulation Preventing Loss of Access to Basic Services in the UK, Sweden, the EU, and Israel

2020 ◽  
Vol 691 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-67
Author(s):  
Hanan Haber
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Welfare Regimes ◽  
Access To Services ◽  
Regulatory Governance ◽  
Basic Services ◽  
The Uk ◽  
State Context ◽  
The Eu ◽  
The Welfare State

What does the state do to prevent consumers from losing access to basic services in the market due to financial hardship, and under what conditions will this occur? Bringing together the literature on regulatory governance and the welfare state, this article compares regulatory regimes that prevent loss of access to services in the UK, Sweden, and Israel in housing credit, electricity, and water, as well as to the electricity and housing credit sectors in the EU, from the early 1990s to the 2010s. The article finds that regulation to address this issue was introduced in all but the Swedish cases. This highlights the significance of the welfare state context in addressing these issues through regulation, as more residual welfare regimes are associated with more social protection through regulation.

scholarly journals Who Undermines the Welfare State? Austerity-Dogmatism and the U-Turn in Swedish Asylum Policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Scarpa ◽  
Carl-Ulrik Schierup
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Financial Burden ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Asylum Policy ◽  
System Breakdown ◽  
Dynamic Interplay ◽  
Generous Welfare ◽  
The Eu ◽  
The Welfare State

Within the EU, the so-called “refugee crisis” has been predominantly dealt with as an ill-timed and untenable financial burden. Since the 2007–08 financial crisis, the overarching objective of policy initiatives by EU-governments has been to keep public expenditure firmly under control. Thus, Sweden’s decision to grant permanent residence to all Syrians seeking asylum in 2013 seemed to represent a paradigmatic exception, pointing to the possibility of combining a humanitarian approach in the “long summer of migration” with generous welfare provisions. At the end of 2015, however, Sweden reversed its asylum policy, reducing its intake of refugees to the EU-mandated minimum. The main political parties embraced the mainstream view that an open-door refugee policy is not only detrimental to the welfare state, but could possibly trigger a “system breakdown”. In this article, we challenge this widely accepted narrative by arguing that the sustainability of the Swedish welfare state has not been undermined by refugee migration but rather by the Swedish government’s unbending adherence to austerity politics. Austerity politics have weakened the Swedish welfare state’s socially integrative functions and prevented the implementation of a more ambitious growth agenda, harvesting a potentially dynamic interplay of expansionary economic policies and a humanitarian asylum policy.

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