Published ten years after the first edition, this new Handbook offers topical, and comprehensive information on the welfare systems of all 28 EU member states and their recent reforms, giving the reader an invaluable introduction and basis for comparative welfare research. Additional chapters provide detailed information on EU social policy, as well as comparative analyses of European welfare systems and their reform pathways. For this second edition, all chapters have been updated and substantially revised, and Croatia additionally included. The second edition of this Handbook is most timely, given the often-fundamental welfare state transformations against the background of the financial and economic crises, transforming social policy ideas, as well as political shifts in a number of European countries. The book sets out to analyse these new developments when it comes to social policy. In the first part, all country chapters provide systematic and comparable information on the foundations of the different national welfare systems and their characteristics. In the second part, using a joint conceptual foundation, they focus on policy changes (especially of the last two decades) in different social policy areas, including old-age, labour market, family, healthcare, and social assistance policies. As the comparative chapters conclude, European welfare system landscapes have been in constant motion in the last two decades. While austerity is not to be seen on the aggregate level, the in-depth country studies show that all policy sectors have been characterised by different reform directions and ideas. The findings not only reveal both change and continuity, but also policy reversal as a distinct type that characterises social policy reform. The book provides a rich resource to the international welfare state research community, and is also useful for social policy teaching.

Through robust theoretical and in-depth empirical studies, this book offers the first opportunity to English-language readers to learn about the Québec experience of a social economy system.

Originally published in 1979. In this forcefully argued book, Milton Santos shows that contemporary explanations of urbanization and spatial organization in underdeveloped countries are inadequate. This failure is attributable to their origins in theories elaborated to explain the development of advanced Western societies. Santos' work provides the basis for the new theory which is so badly needed. He describes the urban economy in these countries in terms of two circuits of activity – an upper circuit consisting of those enterprises and structures which are based on modern technology and are oriented towards the advanced capitalist world, and a lower circuit comprised of more traditional processes and forms of exchange. The dialectical interaction of these two circuits is seen to generate the patterns of growth, forms of State intervention and, above all, the spatial organization characteristic of Third World economies. This was a revision and translation of L’Espace Partagé (1975).

Essays examine security, political, financial, and economic organizations in Africa, and discuss the problems and prospects of each group.