This paper analyses the reform trajectories that are specific to continental European welfare systems, going beyond the idea that this third world of welfare capitalism is frozen. Comparing the reform trajectories in the different countries and sectors, shows that one can identify four successive sequences of reforms over the last 25 years (from reforms aimed at protecting the insured male worker to reforms aimed at re-structuring benefits, financing and governance arrangements). The paper shows that the trajectory followed by these systems has been highly determined by the typical Bismarckian welfare institutions, but also reversed by a learning process. The paper concludes that the consequences of these changes are increasing the insider/outsider cleavage. only subscribers can see the full article

The author highlights the violent reproposal of the neoliberal ideology and the continual mortification of the most important aspects of the European social model according to the deterministic logic of economic models and ineluctable natural processes. The author comes to the conclusion that the factors hypothesised in literature on the crisis in European welfare states are inapplicable; and that the restriction of the range of possible evolutionary courses for future societies does not seem to be underway. The article analyses the alternative hypotheses to the crisis theories and to the demolition of the «European social model», exploring through the «human development’ approach the possible synergies between economic development and social development, competitiveness and justice, rights and growth which can once again shape welfare as a «productive factor». only subscribers can see the full article

Different processes and facts seem to indicate the emergency of new social agendas in Latin America, and more generally, new strategies of economic and social development. The trend can be identified in the growing criticism about the so-called Neoliberal paradigm, that ruled the region for the last quarter century; but also, recently, in the electoral victories of political leaders of left and centre-left, supposedly committed to different and socially more progressive alternatives of economic growth and international insertion; and, finally, in the reforms of social security and education that started in Chile in 2006. A central question is whether the model of growth that oriented the region in the recent past may be reaching its limit. only subscribers can see the full article

This article documents the ways in which a concept which had characterised the high neo-liberal period of the World Bank - social investment - and which plays on the discourse of capitalism, was reworked in the mid-1990s to become, among other things, a set of policies and programmes focused on fighting poverty and improving income security in Europe and Latin America. It documents in particular the adjustments on three dimensions of the citizenship regimes in these two regions. This comparison is based on the observation that, while often having quite different political histories, the Americas and Europe nonetheless share some important similarities in social citizenship practices. Currently, some countries in Latin America have on-going experiments with social citizenship that are not that different several European countries’ choices about how to design a citizenship regime for after neoliberalism. only subscribers can see the full article

Many words have been spent on globalization, but despite its increasing impact on people’s daily lives, even in the most remote corners of the planet, until very recently its social implications were largely disregarded.. For much of the 1980’s and ’90’s attention focussed on the economic face of globalization: on the growing interdependence between the different parts of the world in trade, investment, finance and the organization of production. Yet, at the same time a similar social and political interdependence was growing that — step by step — involved every continent and every country both at organizational and individual level. Today, thanks to the development of transport and, still more, thanks to the new communication technologies, physical distance is no longer the almost insuperable barrier it was in the past: we are all in some way closer and part of a single system. only subscribers can see the full article

Globalization without global and national social policies to equalize the social costs and benefits of globalization will not be acceptable and sustainable in the longer run. The idea of comprehensive - and rights-based - social policies was firmly present when the Un Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. The neo-liberal turn in the 1980s and 1990s put economic growth and the market into the centre of the agenda and effectively marginalized the government and social policy, but the Un Social Summit in Copenhagen 1995 re-introduced the idea of «society for all» to the global development policy agenda. Recently, the Ilo has been instrumental in bridging again the gulf between the «economic» and the «social» by introducing the concepts «social dimension of globalization» and «decent work agenda». The reality is, however, that the Ilo and its national partners in the Ministries of Labour and social Affairs have little money and few partners to operationalize the decent work/comprehensive social policy agenda, while most of the capacity and funding is concentrated in the World Bank’s national partners in the Ministries of Finance. only subscribers can see the full article