Welfare and the Great Recession: A Comparative Study

Stefán Ólafsson · Mary Daly · Olli Kangas · Joakim Palme

Jan 2019 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Welfare and the Great Recession surveys and analyses welfare consequences in the period following the financial crisis in Europe. It investigates how the burdens of the recession were shared between countries, between different socio-economic groups across Europe, and within individual countries, and offers new evidence that demonstrates the importance of the welfare state and government policies in sheltering populations from serious economic contraction. The first comprehensive study of the Great Recession in Europe that focuses on household level welfare consequences, this edited volume relates financial hardship to institutional characteristics such as welfare regimes, currency regimes, socio-political patterns, affluence levels, public debt, and policy reactions to periods of crisis. It takes into account stimulus versus austerity, the degree of social protection emphasis, the commitment to redistribution, and the significance of activism. Widely comparative, Welfare and the Great Recession combines comparisons of thirty countries with an in-depth study of nine country cases to offer various lessons from the crisis experience in Europe and reflect on welfare futures in a globalized crisis-prone environment.

About the author

Stefán Ólafsson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Iceland. Educated at Edinburgh University and has a D.Phil. degree from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He has written extensively on Icelandic society, particularly on welfare, work and social change. Professor Ólafsson is the Icelandic coordinator and a member of the steering board of the European Social Policy Network (ESPN). He has undertaken various administrative duties and commissions, including on the board of the University of Iceland, the Icelandic Council of Science and Technology, and he was the Chairman of the Board of the public Icelandic Social Security Administration from 2007 to 2017. Mary Daly is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Oxford. Among the fields on which she has published are welfare state, gender, family and labour market, poverty. She is a member of a number of networks and boards on topics related to the welfare state, employment, family and gender and an editor of the journal Social Politics. She is the Irish Co-ordinator of the European Network on Social Policy. Her latest book is Families and Poverty - Everyday Life on a Low Income (co-authored with Grace Kelly, Policy Press, 2015). Mary Daly's research has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the EU, Council of Europe, ILO and UNICEF. She has over 6,400 Google Scholar citations. Olli Kangas is Professor of Practice at Turku University Finland. He was formerly Director of the Research Department at the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, Visiting Professor at Uppsala University, and H.C. Andersen Professor at the University of Southern Denmark amongst others. He is an invited member of the Finnish Academic Society for Letters and Sciences (2008-), and was previously Chair of the Editorial Board of Kela Publishing and member of editorial boards at Social Politics, Janus, Sosiologia, the European Sociological Review, and the European Journal of Social Policy. Olli Kanga's research interests focus on comparative analysis of social policy systems. Currently, he is the planner and leader of the ongoing Finnish experiment on basic income, the head of the strategic research program Equal Society, and a member of the Prime Minister's expert group on reforming the Finnish social policy system. Joakin Palme is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, and Chairman of The Migration Studies Delegation. He was previously Director of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, and contributed to the Social Citizenship Indicator Program at the Swedish Institute for Social Research and chaired the Swedish Welfare Commission. He has published extensively on the welfare state as a strategy of equality and the politics of the welfare state.