Overview

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.

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9780198896081

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Reviews

In a masterful account of how European welfare states responded to the Great Recession of 2009 and the Covid epidemic, this book provides an up-to-date assessment of the operation and performance of the European social model at both the national and European levels. It will be immensely useful to everyone interested in European social policy and the future of welfare states. * Peter A. Hall, Harvard University * An indispensable book for both defenders and opponents of the welfare state. After reading it, no one will be able to argue empirically for the inevitability of the trade-off between social policy and efficiency. And no one can hide behind the difficulties of the moment. Delving into the still under-explored social policy developments from the Great Recession to the Covid crisis, the book offers a robust and wise set of proposals to advance the European social model, in a prose capturing the reader from beginning to end. * Elena Granaglia, Universit`a Roma Tre * This book offers readers a descriptively rich discussion of reforms in an impressive number of policy fields across numerous European welfare states. It also develops an original argument about the effects of the experiential legacy of the Great Recession on contemporary welfare states in Europe, making the book a must-read for scholars and policy makers alike. * Barbara Vis, Utrecht University *

Author Information

Anton Hemerijck is Professor of Political Science and Sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI). He has previously held positions at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was Director of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), the principal think tank in the Netherlands. More recently, he was a member of the European Commission High-Level Group on the Future of Social Protection and of the Welfare State in the EU (2021 - 2023). He is the author of Changing Welfare States (OUP, 2013) and editor of The Uses of Social Investment (OUP, 2017). Manos Matsaganis is Professor of Public Finance at Polytechnic University of Milan. Prior to this, he worked at the Athens University of Economics and Business, in the Office of the Greek Prime Minister, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University and University of California Berkeley, and is currently Senior Researcher at the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) in Athens, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan.

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