Measuring Welfare Entitlement Generosity in Transitional Welfare States: The Case of Post-communist Countries in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Measuring welfare state generosity in developing welfare states is often challenged not only by lack of comparative quantitative data, but also by issues of conceptual stretching. This paper demonstrates and discusses the use of one of the key measures of welfare entitlement generosity developed in the comparative welfare state research in the context of post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). With the new time series data provided by the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset 2 (CWED2), comparative approaches including the CEE countries have become feasible. This paper first discusses quantitative measures of welfare entitlement generosity in the tradition of the social rights of citizenship-approach and how they can be applied for cross-country comparisons. It then demonstrates empirically how the emerging CEE welfare states' generosity compares to the Western European mature welfare states. Finally, the paper shows the potential and the pitfalls of quantitative measures of welfare state generosity by discussing, to what extent do indicators of social security scheme generosity measure the same in established and emerging welfare states, which functional equivalents may be relevant in the context of emerging welfare states and how far can we stretch our theoretical concepts.

Determinants of social expenditures in post-socialist countries

“…Moreover, welfare generosity, an alternative measure developed by the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset, also cannot precisely capture how many people are covered by benefits or what the outcomes of the social security system are. In particular, this factor may underestimate outcomes in post-socialist countries because of the lack of massive upheavals during the transition period (Kuitto, 2018), as well as the small number of post-socialist countries covered. Thus, the dependent variable in this study is welfare effort, defined as the proportion of social security spending as a percentage of GDP and extracted from the International Monetary Fund Government Finance Statistics, which includes old-age, disability, and survivors' pensions, allowances for illness, family needs, and maternity, unemployment benefits, and industrial accident insurance benefits.…”

Positional, Mobility, and Reference Effects: How Does Social Class Affect Life Satisfaction in Europe?

“…However, there are important differences between these regions that lead us to believe that the strength of the associations between social class and life satisfaction differs. First, most Eastern European countries experienced large increases in income inequality (Grosfeld & Senik, 2010;Solt, 2019), have less easily accessible welfare states (Kuitto, 2018) and exhibit lower levels of economic development.…”

Measuring welfare states beyond the three worlds: Refining state‐of‐the‐art tools

“…We believe that old and new cases are, in principle, analytically comparable and that the expansion of SCIP and CWED offers us tremendous opportunities. Still, as Kuitto (2018) shows, this expansion presents some challenges, too. We aim to advance this debate in this article by identifying challenges the datasets are facing when measuring welfare states beyond the three worlds.…”

“…SCIP, in addition, integrates data on work accident and family policies. As their indicators are generally based on national social security legislation, SCIP and CWED capture the ‘de jure status’ (Kuitto, 2018). For some indicators, such as coverage, the datasets complement legislative data with statistical data, usually from the respective social security institutions.…”

“…We can now calculate decommodification index (DI) and benefit generosity index (BGI) scores for these cases. Now that we can compare welfare states old and new, the next question is whether these measurements work equally well for both groups of countries (Kuitto, 2018). In this article, we explore the extent to which state‐of‐the‐art tools developed for classic welfare states can be refined to improve our measurements of ‘new’ welfare states.…”