Family Policies Across the Globe

Abstract

This chapter analyzes family policies across the globe, describing patterns in the development of family allowances, leave schemes, and ECEC services both in developed and developing regions. Using the OECD family database and the ILO global social protection database, it compares the developments in family policy across different regions. The chapter reveals that the way regions and countries in the world have followed the main goals of family policy varies significantly, not only in terms of coverage and quality, but also in terms of design and context of implementation. Despite the efforts made in developing regions are still limited and rarely based on the idea of a universal set of interrelated transfers and services, there is still room for them to learn from the experience of the leaders in family policy.

Challenges in family policy research

“…Research on developing countries adds still another dimension to the differential impact of work-family balance policies: that of segmented and differentiated labour markets, in countries where the boundaries between formal and informal economies are blurred and many workers (particularly women) are employed in the informal economy, with no, or little, employment-related social rights, including that of paid or even unpaid maternity leave (Filgueira and Rossel, 2021). Europe-style leave and benefits, therefore, are likely to benefit disproportionally women (and men) of the educated middle classes who are employed in the formal economy and constitute only a comparatively small portion of the country's workers.…”

“…In the former, this dynamism is in contrast with the stagnation, when not retrenching, of more traditional social policy measures. In the latter, where family policies are often strictly intertwined with anti-poverty ones, this dynamism seems to point to a pattern of welfare state development that differs from that which has been typical of most Western, developed countries: family policies, rather than policies seem to constitute the stronger nucleus of still embryonic or underdeveloped welfare states (compared with the 'traditional' ones) (see, for example, Daly, 2018;Filgueira and Rossel, 2021).…”

Origins of Family Policy: Prerequisites or Diffusion

“…Gauthier's book (1996) remains the definitive comparative in-depth study of the diverse origins and trajectories of family policy in the countries that now belong to the group of rich, democratic welfare states. Comparative studies with a Latin-American (Blofield and Martinez Franzoni 2015;Blofield and Touchton 2020), East-Asian (Fleckenstein and Lee 2017;Saraceno 2016), and even a global focus (Filgueira and Rossel 2020) have started to appear, but for the most part, ignore the historical roots of the policies they study. We provide the first global analysis of the origins of family policy, systematically testing established theories and propositions.…”