Welfare state

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There are two main interpretations of the idea of a welfare state:

• A model in which the state assumes primary responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. This responsibility in theory ought to be comprehensive^{[citation needed]}, because all aspects of welfare are considered and universally applied to citizens as a "right". Welfare state can also mean the creation of a "safety net" of minimum standards^{[citation needed]} of varying forms of welfare. Here is found some confusion between a "welfare state" and a "welfare society" (see below) in common debate about the definition of the term.
• The provision of welfare in society. In many "welfare states", especially in continental Europe, welfare is not actually provided by the state, but by a combination of independent, voluntary, mutualist and government services. The functional provider of benefits and services may be a central or state government, a state-sponsored company or agency, a private corporation, a charity or another form of non-profit organization. However, this phenomenon has been more appropriately termed a "welfare society," and the term "welfare system" has been used to describe the range of welfare state and welfare society mixes that are found.^[1]

[edit] Etymology

The English term "welfare state" is believed by Asa Briggs to have been coined by Archbishop William Temple during the Second World War, contrasting wartime Britain with the "warfare state" of Nazi Germany.^[2] Friedrich Hayek contends that the term derived from the older German word Wohlfahrtsstaat, which itself was used by nineteenth century historians to describe a variant of the ideal of Polizeistaat ("police state"). It was fully developed by the German academic Sozialpolitiker—"socialists of the chair"—from 1870 and first implemented through Bismarck's "state socialism".^[3] Bismarck's policies have also been seen as the creation of a welfare state.^[4]

In German, a roughly equivalent term (Sozialstaat, "social state") had been in use since 1870. There had been earlier attempts to use the same phrase in English, for example in Munroe Smith's text "Four German Jurists",^[5] but the term did not enter common use until William Temple popularized it. The Italian term "Social state" (Stato sociale) has the same origin.

The Swedish welfare state is called Folkhemmet and goes back to the 1936 compromise between the Union and big Corporate companies. It is a Mixed economy, built on strong unions and a strong system of Social security and universal health care.

In French, the synonymous term "providence state" (État-providence) was originally coined as a sarcastic pejorative remark used by opponents of welfare state policies during the Second Empire (1854-1870).

In Spanish and many other languages, an analogous term is used: estado del bienestar; translated literally: "state of well-being".

In Portuguese, a similar phrase exists: Estado de Bem-Estar-Social; which means "social-well-being state".

[edit] Early welfare states

The "concept of what one might call a welfare state" appeared during the Abbasid Caliphate in the 8th century. The concepts of welfare and pension were introduced in early Islamic law as forms of Zakat (charity), one of the five Pillars of Islam, since the time of Caliph al-Mansur. The taxes (including Zakat and Jizya) collected in the treasury of an Islamic government was used to provide income for the needy, including the poor, elderly, orphans, widows, and the disabled. According to the Islamic jurist Al-Ghazali (Algazel, 1058-1111), the government was also expected to store up food supplies in every region in case a disaster or famine occurred.^[6]

[edit] Modern welfare states

Modern welfare states developed through a gradual process beginning in the late 19th century and continuing through the 20th. They differed from previous schemes of poverty relief due to their relatively universal coverage. The development of social insurance in Germany under Bismarck was particularly influential. Some schemes, like those in Scandinavia, were based largely in the development of autonomous, mutualist provision of benefits. Others were founded on state provision. The term was not, however, applied to all states offering social protection. The sociologist T.H. Marshall identified the welfare state as a distinctive combination of democracy, welfare and capitalism. Examples of early welfare states in the modern world are Germany, all of the Nordic Countries, the Netherlands, Australia, Uruguay and New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the 1930s.

Changed attitudes in reaction to the Great Depression were instrumental in the move to the welfare state in many countries, a harbinger of new times where "cradle-to-grave" services became a reality after the poverty of the Depression. During the Great Depression, it was seen as an alternative "middle way" between communism and capitalism.^[7] In the period following the Second World War, many countries in Europe moved from partial or selective provision of social services to relatively comprehensive coverage of the population.

The activities of present-day welfare states extend to the provision of both cash welfare benefits (such as old-age pensions or unemployment benefits) and in-kind welfare services (such as health or childcare services). Through these provisions, welfare states can affect the distribution of wellbeing and personal autonomy among their citizens, as well as influencing how their citizens consume and how they spend their time.^[8][9]

After the discovery and inflow of the oil revenue, Saudi Arabia,^[10][11] Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates all became welfare states.

In the United Kingdom, the beginning of the modern welfare state was in 1911 when David Lloyd George suggested everyone in work should pay national insurance contribution for unemployment and health benefits from work.

In 1942, the Social Insurance and Allied Services was created by Sir William Beveridge in order to aid those who were in need of help, or in poverty. Beveridge worked as a volunteer for the poor, and set up national insurance. He stated that 'All people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed.' The basic assumptions of the report were the National Health Service, which provided free health care to the UK. The Universal Child Benefit was a scheme to give benefits to parents, encouraging people to have children by enabling them to feed and support a family. This was particularly beneficial after the second world war when the population of the United Kingdom declined. Universal Child Benefit may have helped drive the Baby boom. The impact of the report was huge and 600,000 copies were made.

Beveridge recommended to the government that they should find ways of tackling the five giants, being Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. He argued to cure these problems, the government should provide adequate income to people, adequate health care, adequate education, adequate housing and adequate employment. Before 1939, health care had to be paid for, this was done through a vast network of friendly societies, trade unions and other insurance companies which counted the vast majority of the UK working population as members. These friendly societies provided insurance for sickness, unemployment and invalidity, therefore providing people with an income when they were unable to work. But because of the 1942 Beveridge Report, in 5 July 1948, the National Insurance Act, National Assistance Act and National Health Service Act came into force, thus this is the day that the modern UK welfare state was founded.

Welfare systems were developing intensively since the end of the World War II. At the end of century due to their restructuration part of their responsibilities started to be channeled through non-governmental organizations which became important providers of social services.^[12]

[edit] Two forms of the welfare state

There are two ways of organizing a welfare state:^[13]

According to the first model the state is primarily concerned with directing the resources to “the people most in need”. This requires a tight bureaucratic control over the people concerned, with a maximum of interference in their lives to establish who are "in need" and minimize cheating. The unintended result is that there is a sharp divide between the receivers and the producers of social welfare, between "us" and "them", the producers tending to dismiss the whole idea of social welfare because they will not receive anything of it. This model is dominant in the US.

According to the second model the state distributes welfare with as little bureaucratic interference as possible, to all people who fulfill easily established criteria (e.g. having children, receiving medical treatment, etc). This requires high taxing, of which almost everything is channeled back to the taxpayers with minimum expenses for bureaucratic personnel. The intended – and also largely achieved – result is that there will be a broad support for the system since most people will receive at least something. This model was constructed by the Scandinavian ministers Karl Kristian Steincke and Gustav Möller in the 30s and is dominant in Scandinavia.

[edit] Effects on poverty

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Empirical evidence suggests that taxes and transfers considerably reduce poverty in most countries, whose welfare states commonly constitute at least a fifth of GDP.^[14][15]

[edit] Criticisms

The examples and perspective in this section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Some criticism of welfare states concern the idea that a welfare state makes citizens dependent and less inclined to work. Certain studies indicate there is no association between economic performance and welfare expenditure in developed countries (see A. B. Atkinson, Incomes and the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press, 1995) and that there is no evidence for the contention that welfare states impede progressive social development. R. E. Goodin et al, in The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), compares the United States, which spends relatively little on social welfare (less than 17 per cent of GDP), with other countries which spend considerably more. This study claims that on some economic and social indicators the United States performs worse than the Netherlands, which has a high commitment to welfare provision. However, the United States leads most welfare states on certain economic indicators, such as GDP per capita (although in 2006 it had a lower GDP per capita than Norway and Denmark). [1] The United States also has a low unemployment rate (although not as low as Denmark, Norway) and a high GDP growth rate, at least in comparison to other developed countries (its growth rate, however, is lower than Finland's and Sweden's, two nations with relatively small populations but comparatively high commitments to welfare provision; the United States' growth rate is also lower than the world's overall). [2] [3] The United States also leads most welfare states in the ownership of consumer goods. For example, it has more TVs per capita [4], more personal computers per capita [5], and more radios per capita [6] than welfare states.

Another criticism comes from Right-Libertarianism. Namely, that welfare is theft of property or labor. This criticism is based upon right-wing libertarian ideals, wherein a citizen owns his body, and owns the product of his body's labor (i.e. goods, services, or money). So to remove money through legal mechanisms set by a democratically elected assembly from the working citizen and give it to a non-working citizen is argued to be theft of the person's property and/or labor and a violation of his property rights.

A third criticism is that the welfare state allegedly provides its dependents with a similar level of income to the minimum wage. Critics argue that fraud and economic inactivity are apparently quite common now in the United Kingdom and France. Some conservatives in the UK claim that the welfare state has produced a generation of dependents who, instead of working, rely solely upon the state for income and support; even though assistance is only legally available to those unable to work. The welfare state in the UK was created to provide a carefully selected number of people with a subsistence level of benefits in order to alleviate poverty, but that as a matter of opinion has been expanded to provide a large number of people indiscriminately with more money than the country can afford. Some feel that this argument is demonstrably false: the benefits system in the UK hands out considerably less money than the national minimum wage, although people on welfare often find that they qualify for a variety of benefits, including benefits in-kind, such as subsidized accommodation which usually make the overall benefits much higher than figures show.

A fourth criticism of the welfare state is that it results in high taxes. This is usually true, as evidenced by places like Denmark (tax level at 48.9% of GDP in 2007)^[16] and Sweden (tax level at 48.2% of GDP in 2007)^[17]. Such high taxes do not necessarily mean less income for the nation overall, since the state taxes go directly to the people it is taxed from. The real issue is that they result in a major redistribution of that income from the citizens on the productive side of the equation to the citizens on the welfare state side. However, these taxes go into services that benefit everyone in the society, such as tuition-free higher education, and free health care.

A fifth criticism of the welfare state is the belief that welfare services provided by the state are more expensive and less efficient than the same services would be if provided by private businesses. In 2000, Professors Louis Kaplow and Steven Shafell published two papers, arguing that any social policy based on such concepts as justice or fairness would result in an economy which is Pareto inefficient. Anything which is supplied free at the point of consumption would be subject to artificially high demand, whereas resources would be more properly allocated if provision reflected the cost. However it is not clear how this would apply to services such as health and education, where individuals are unlikely to demand more services that are actually required^{[citation needed]}, where the benefits of providing the service flow through to all levels of society (by reducing disease, and increasing the wealth-creation abilities of the population). Frequently cited by extremist groupings as merely a method of aiding the feeble (resultantly from self inaction or deliberate motives) via penalising the potent intellectual or even general, innocent public, the Welfare State is a caldera of very visual opinions.

The most extreme criticisms of states and governments, are from anarchists, who believe that all states and governments are undesirable and/or unnecessary. Most anarchists believe that while social welfare gives a certain level of independency from the market and individual capitalists, it creates dependence to the state, which is the institution that, according to this view, supports and protects capitalism in the first place. Nonetheless, according to Noam Chomsky, "social democrats and anarchists always agreed, fairly generally, on so-called 'welfare state measures'" and "Anarchists propose other measures to deal with these problems, without recourse to state authority."^[18] Anarchists believe in stopping welfare programs only if it means abolishing government and capitalism as well.^[19]

[edit] The welfare state and social expenditure

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% ‎of social expenditure over GDP in OECD states, 2001

Correlation between GDP (PPP) per capita and welfare expenditure as a percentage of GDP.

Correlation between HDI score and welfare expenditure as a percentage of GDP.

Welfare provision in the contemporary world tends to be more advanced in countries with stronger developed economies. Poor countries tend to have limited resources for social services. There is very little correlation between economic performance and welfare expenditure.^[20]

There are individual exceptions on both sides, but as the table below suggests, the higher levels of social expenditure in the European Union are not associated with lower growth, lower productivity or higher unemployment, nor with higher growth, higher productivity or lower unemployment. Likewise, the pursuit of free market policies leads neither to guaranteed prosperity or social collapse. The table shows that countries with more limited expenditure, like Australia, Canada and Japan do no better or worse economically than countries with high social expenditure, like Belgium, Germany and Denmark. The table does not show the effect of expenditure on income inequalities, and does not encompass some other forms of welfare provision (such as occupational welfare). Overall, there is a slight positive correlation between increased spending on social services and higher GDP per capita as well as higher HDI rating.

The table below shows, first, welfare expenditure as a percentage of GDP for some (selected) OECD member states, with and without public education,^[21] and second, GDP per capita (PPP US$) in 2001:

Figures from the OECD^[22] and the UNDP.^[23]

Note: no data for China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, and Pakistan, which are not members of the OECD.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

• Stein Kuhnle Survival of the European Welfare State 2000 Routledge ISBN 041521291X

[edit] External links

• Center for Public Policy
• Social Policy Virtual Library
• Social Sciences Information Gateway
• Race and Welfare in the United States
• The Welfare State: A Critique
• Shavell's criticism of social justice programmes
• Kaplow's criticism of social justice programmes.
• World report on Welfare State
• Journal containing free daily information on welfare policies at local, national and EU level

[edit] Data and statistics

• OECD - Health Policy and Data: Health Division Website
• OECD - National Accounts: Statistics Portal