Although long-term processes of welfare state development have been investigated frequently, there is a surprising gap in knowledge on short-term reactions of states to sudden events. This article aims to fill this gap by examining the reactive policies, i.e. immediate policy responses to urgent social matters, of governments to the current economic crisis. We focus on social and unemployment policies of the three welfare regime ideal types of Esping-Andersen's typology, namely Germany, the UK and Sweden. We apply long-term policy development theories, most notably the convergence and path dependence theories, to understand the choices made in the different reactive policy strategies of these countries. In addition, we scrutinize whether we find similarities between the reactive policies and the converging structural welfare state developments. We use comparable data from various European and national data sources for the two years directly following the recent crisis, namely 2008 and 2009. Our analysis shows that, at least for the three countries under investigation, countries seem to have fallen back on 'old habits' by adopting social and unemployment reactive policies that can be identified based on their institutional legacies. This suggests that reactive policy strategies can be explained by different dynamics than the more structural long-term policy developments, and in our case we find evidence in support for the path dependence theory.
Technological change is widely considered to be a key driver of the economic and occupational structure of affluent countries. Current advances in information technology have led to a significant substitution of routine work by capital, while occupations with abstract or interpersonal manual task structures are complemented or unaffected. We develop a simple theoretical framework for the reasons why individuals in routine task-intensive occupations would prefer public insurance against the increased risk of future income loss resulting from automation. Moreover, we contend that this relation will be stronger for richer individuals who have more to lose from automation. We focus on the role of occupational elements of risk exposure and challenge some general interpretations of the determinants of redistribution preferences. We test the implications of our theoretical framework with survey data for 17 European countries between 2002 and 2012. While up to now the political economy literature has emphasized other occupational risks, we find vulnerability to automation to be an important determinant of the demand for redistribution that should not be ignored.
Divergence between the evolution of GDP per capita and the income of a “typical” household as measured in household surveys is giving rise to a range of serious concerns, especially in the USA. This paper investigates the extent of that divergence and the factors that contribute to it across 27 OECD countries, using data from OECD National Accounts and the Luxembourg Income Study. While GDP per capita has risen faster than median household income in most of these countries over the period these data cover, the size of that divergence varied very substantially, with the USA a clear outlier. The paper distinguishes a number of factors contributing to such a divergence, and finds wide variation across countries in the impact of the various factors. Further, both the extent of that divergence and the role of the various contributory factors vary widely over time for most of the countries studied. These findings have serious implications for the monitoring and assessment of changes in household incomes and living standards over time.
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