New Perspectives on the Welfare State offers an appraisal of comparative social policy and applies it to our current uncertainties concerning European communities and European-North American and East Asian relationships.

Offers an overview of issues concerning European welfare states. This illustrated book brings together a discussion of the theories and techniques of comparative policy analysis, and a description of developments in selected welfare state regimes. It also features case-studies, chapter summaries, questions, and guides for further reading.

A common belief is that the European welfare states are in a position of crisis or heading towards one with the process of globalization removing any hopes of eventual worldwide welfare. This book challenges this assumption arguing that a proper understanding of the future role of the welfare state requires a broader social perspective that encompasses the interaction of economic, political and social processes. The Future of the Welfare State provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the practical and theoretical challenges which the welfare state (and progress towards world welfare) can and must meet in the future.

Although in Europe there continues to be a large degree of consensus that it is the responsibility of government to ensure that nobody who is poor, sick, disabled, unemployed, or old is left deprived, there are mounting calls to roll back spending on the welfare state. It is argued that it fails to achieve its main objectives, that it is responsible for a decline in economic performance, and that it was conceived in a very different period and is therefore not adapted to modern realities. This second edition of The Welfare State in Europe: Economic and Social Perspectives provides an informed analysis of the key criticisms of the welfare state and examines the prospects of this system in an increasingly integrated world. It answers important questions regarding the current social situation of European countries, the performance of the welfare states, and the reforms that should be undertaken. It calls for fundamental changes in social policies in order to address the rising inequality that hampers social cohesion in Europe. Now focused on Europe in its entirety and including a new chapter on long term care, this new edition of an integral text on the welfare state places increased focus on social divisions and the populist vote to provide a balanced and up-to-date analysis of the performance of current systems.

This volume seeks to contribute to an interdisciplinary, comparative, and historical study of Western welfare states. It attempts to link their historical dynamics and contemporary problems in an international perspective. Building on collaboration between European-and American-based research groups, the editors have coordinated contributions by economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians. The developments they analyze cover a time span from the initiation of modern national social policies at the end of the nineteenth century to the present. The experiences of all the presently existing Western European systems except Spain and Portugal are systematically encompassed, with comparisons developed selectively with the experiences of the United States and Canada. The development of the social security systems, of public expenditures!and taxation, of public education and educational opportunities, and of income inequality are described, compared, and analyzed for varying groupings of the Western European and North American nations. This volume addresses itself mainly to two audiences. The first includes all students of policy problems of the welfare states who seek to gain a comparative perspective and historical understanding. A second group may be more interested in the theory and empirical analysis of long-term societal developments. In this context, the growth of the welfare states ranges as a major departure, along with the development of national states and capitalist economies. The welfare state is interpreted as a general phenomenon of modernization, as a product of the increasing differentiation and the growing size of societies on the one hand, and of processes of social and political mobilization on the other. It is an important element of the structural convergence of modern societies -- by its mere weight in all countries -- and at the same time a source of divergence by the variations within its institutional structure.

The changing nature and significance of housing provision within welfare states is considered in this timely book. With housing playing an increasingly important role in welfare provision, the new welfare state emerging in different parts of the world is being developed in the context of individual asset accumulation and the private ownership of housing. Housing and the New Welfare State shows that housing is becoming critical to asset-based welfare not only in Western Europe but also in the six East Asian housing systems that are a major focus of the book. Chapters by leading East Asian scholars provide analysis of housing policies in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan. Also examined are the 'four worlds' of welfare and housing; the causes and consequences of the shift from tenants to home owners in the old welfare states of Britain and other parts of Western Europe; and the growth of the property-owning welfare state as a theme running through contemporary policy in both East Asia and Europe.

This book breaks new intellectual ground in the analysis of the German welfare state. Bleses and Seeleib-Kaiser argue that we are witnessing a dual transformation of the welfare state, which is caused by the emergence of new dominating interpretative patterns. Increasingly, the state reduces its social policy commitments towards securing the achieved living standard of former wage earners, which in the past had been the key normative principle of social policy in Germany, while at the same time public support and services for families are expanded.