Recrafting Social Contracts: Welfare Reform in Latin America, East Asia and Central Europe

<p>The objective of this project is to explain distinctive patterns in the reform of social insurance (particularly pensions and health insurance) and social services (basic education and health services) in a sample of middle-income developing and formerly socialist countries. The main components of the project are three: 1) quantitative analysis of social spending in global and regional samples of developing and formerly socialist countries; 2) detailed comparative case analysis of social policy reform in the period from 1980 to the present for a focused sample of cases1 from the three regions; and 3) construction of a new data set on social spending in a sample of federal and decentralized systems. The study of the origin, expansion and changing nature of the welfare state is a central pillar of the comparative politics of the advanced industrial states. Analysis of the politics of social welfare in developing countries is much more recent. This project extends the theoretical insights of the literature on the OECD to a sample of middle-income countries. The researchers consider and modify a number of core hypotheses in this literature, including the effects of globalization, regime type and other institutional factors, to the developing and formerly-socialist country context. The central theoretical orientation of the project is to consider how social welfare models were complementary to broader development strategies in the three regions: export-oriented growth in some Asian countries, import-substitution in Latin America and state socialism in Eastern Europe. The researchers examine how the transformation or collapse of these models has generated political conflict around social policy reform, and how partisan conflict over the issue has in turn influenced the reform path. The cases considered in greater depth are: in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela; in Asia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand; in Central Europe, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. For broader social value, the debate over the appropriate design of social policy is clearly a very important one, and one objective is to contribute to the debate about policy design. In addition, the data sets from this project will be put in the public domain for academic, research, and non-commercial purposes and thus facilitate research on social policy and decentralization. </p>