Documents Hemerijck, Anton 23 results

"Published within the framework of the ‘Well-being 2030' project, co-financed by the European Commission, this new issue of Challenge Europe addresses the question of how to turn social policy into an effective productive factor, enabling well-being of Europeans and economic growth. Based on the argument that social policy can contribute to long-term sustainable growth, this multi-author publication focuses on those policies which can potentially bring the most added value to citizens' life, and includes contributions from high-level policy-makers, academics, business representatives and experts about the future of social policy in Europe. While the first chapter explores the possible synergies between growth, well-being and social policy, the second part of this EPC's policy journal turns to those policy areas where intervention can be the most effective. Finally, in a third chapter, the authors look at the EU's room of manoeuvre and propose specific policy actions."

"Welfare provision is often conceived through the lens of decommodification and analysed in (re)distributive terms. This article argues that a distributive approach does not sufficiently capture the complexity of 21st century welfare state dynamics. It proposes re-conceptualizing provision as a mix of three policy functions: raising and maintaining human capital stock; easing the flow of gendered life-course and labour-market transitions; guaranteeing social safety-net buffers. This analytical perspective allows theorizing life-course multiplier effects and policy (non-)complementarities, both at the level of individual objective and subjective well-being and in terms of aggregate employment, poverty and fiscal sustainability. This perspective also enables us to extend the temporal horizon of welfare politics beyond short-term electoral logics for explaining welfare reform. The article underscores how methodological pluralism remains key for understanding contemporary welfare states, and for grasping welfare outcomes and institutional change in a research endeavour that involves both generalization and contextualization."

"This book primarily explores the welfare-policy responses to the Great Recession, reform trajectories that swept across Europe over the last decade, with a final chapter that focuses on Covid-19 welfare management. The 2008 crash marked a critical stress test for European welfare states with dramatic repercussions, including a massive surge in unemployment, a widening in wage and income disparities, and rising poverty. Hikes in fiscal deficits and public debt, required to pre-empt an economic meltdown, forced policymakers to make painful cuts in welfare services to shore up public finances, thereby jeopardizing welfare support for vulnerable groups. The overall scope of welfare-policy responses is heterogeneous, disparate, and uneven. In some cases, the response to the Great Recession was accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in others unpopular crisis-management measures received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions, and employer organizations. Alongside serious retrenchments, there have been assertive attempts to rebuild social programmes and institutions, to accommodate policy repertoires-not merely domestically but also at the EU level-to the new realities of the knowledge economy and an ageing society. Overall, the long 2010s showed that the future of work and welfare is in our hands: it is perfectly possible to shape this future in such a way as to provide inclusive social security, achieve high employment, advance and maintain human capabilities across the life-course, and fight poverty and inequality."

"Since the late 1970s, all the developed welfare states of the European Union (EU) have been recasting the basic policy mix on which their national systems of social protection were built after 1945. Intensified global competition, industrial restructuring, budgetary austerity, changing family relations and demographic ageing have thrown into question the once sovereign and stable welfare systems of the Golden Age'. Moreover, domestic issues of work and welfare have more recently become ever more intertwined with processes of European political and economic integration. In this respect, it is fair to say that in the EU we have entered an era of semi-sovereign welfare states. Together, these forces have produced a momentum of system change that goes far beyond the popular notion of welfare state ‘retrenchment'. The ‘new' welfare edifice suggests a departure from a ‘politics against markets' social-protection perspective, towards more of a ‘politics with markets', social-investment approach. This paper tries to capture the comprehensive character of the ongoing effort to recast the architecture of the post-war social contract in terms of the concept of welfare recalibration for both heuristic and prescriptive purposes. It also addresses the engagement of the EU in ongoing processes of recalibrating Europe's semi-sovereign welfare states. In the policy debate the term ‘European social model' is often invoked. Yet such generalisations gloss over the immense differences in welfare state development, design and institutional make-up across the EU's 25 member states and, as a consequence, fail to capture the complexity of “contingently convergent” reform trajectories in the recent period."

"Leading scholars in the field examine the highly topical issue of the future of the welfare state in Europe. They argue that welfare states need to adjust, and examine which kind of welfare architecture will further Europe's stated goal of maximum social inclusion and justice. The volume concentrates on four principal social‐policy domains: the aged and transition to retirement; the welfare issues related to profound changes in working life; the new risks and needs that arise in households and, especially, in families with children; and the challenges of creating gender equality. The analysis strongly supports the idea that open coordination of social policies in the European Union, if applied judiciously, can contribute significantly to the achievement of social justice for Europe's citizens."

"Half a decade after the euro crisis, the European Union is in dire need of a growth strategy that is economically viable, politically legitimate and seen as socially fair. The United Kingdom's fateful choice for Brexit has given new urgency to this imperative. While it is deplorable to lose a strong political force behind the internal market, Britain's decision to leave the EU does create a window of opportunity for taking the Union's “social market economy” ambitions, as laid down in Articles 2 and 3 of the Lisbon Treaty, more seriously than before.This article extensively builds on the analysis originally advanced in the monograph A. Hemerijck: Changing Welfare States, Oxford 2013, Oxford University Press and in my more recent articles on the euro crisis and the economics of social investment. Comments by Gerda Falkner, Maurizio Ferrera, Frank Vandenbroucke and Simon Vydra are gratefully acknowledged."

"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 Europe's 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."

"Changing Welfare States is is a major new examination of the wave of social reform that has swept across Europe over the past two decades. In a comparative fashion, it analyses reform trajectories and political destinations in an era of rapid socioeconomic restructuring, including the critical impact of the global financial crisis on welfare state futures. The book argues that the overall scope of social reform across the member states of the European Union varies widely. In some cases welfare state change has been accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in other instances unpopular social reforms received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions and employer organizations. The analysis reveals trajectories of welfare reform in many countries that are more proactive and reconstructive than is often argued in academic research and the media. Alongside retrenchments, there have been deliberate attempts - often given impetus by intensified European (economic) integration - to rebuild social programs and institutions and thereby accommodate welfare policy repertoires to the new economic and social realities of the 21st century. Welfare state change is work in progress, leading to patchwork mixes of old and new policies and institutions, on the lookout, perhaps, for greater coherence. Unsurprisingly, that search process remains incomplete, resulting from the institutionally bounded and contingent adaptation to the challenges of economic globalization, fiscal austerity, family and gender change, adverse demography, and changing political cleavages."