The Welfare Modelling Business

The paper starts out by identifying a substantial increase in the use of welfare state typologies within comparative studies. This has developed to a degree where many authors take it for granted that the world consists of a limited number of well-defined welfare regimes. This discussion took off in 1990 and it is expected to continue as an important dimension of welfare and social policy research long into the next millennium. It is shown that the idea of ordering welfare states according to ideal-typical models dates back to the late 1950s and was elaborated substantially during the early 1970s, though rather unnoticed. The publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990 is identified as the starting point for what has now become a whole academic industry, here entitled the Welfare Modelling Business. Different typologies with different degrees of differentiation are discussed: should we consider welfare capitalism to come in two, three, four or more models? Though the differentiation into regimes is widely recognized, there have, of course, been many discussions about problems and shortcomings. Two major issues are elaborated: the one-sided focus on social insurance provisions and the simultaneous neglect of personal social services; and the parallel one-sided focus on state and market and the neglect of civil societal institutions such as family and networks. The paper concludes that welfare typologizing must take into account the kinds of programmes analysed: context matters.     

以无中心的差异为基础的多元主义及其政治向度

真正意义上的多元主义,是消除了一元主义和二元对立,摆脱了一与多的纠缠,打破了同一性原则,确立了以无中心(无同一性)的差异原则和异质多样性为旨归的多元主义。尼采的视觉主义的多元主义,福柯的无中心差异的多元主义,德里达的延异(différance)的多元主义,以及德勒兹的性质多样性的多元主义,都是多元主义诉求的有效表达方式。这种以无中心的差异为基础的多元主义所诉求的政治,是与规范拉开距离,把政治行动从统一化、总体化中解放出来的多元自主的政治,是对当下西方多元化社会政治运动的理论回应。     

流转税和所得税的福利效应研究

 本文根据我国城市（镇）不同收入阶层1999年至2008年的支出结构数据及现金收入和支出统计状况,测算出我国城镇居民消费支出的有效税率②和所得税额;利用跨期消费决策的两期模型,构造居民消费效用函数,即消费者的福利函数,测算出我国流转税和所得税的福利损失（成本）。结果显示：我国居民消费符合边际消费倾向递减规律;不同收入阶层的消费时间偏好不同,收入水平越低越倾向于当前消费;流转税具有明显的累退效应,而所得税的累进效应,特别是个人所得税的累进效应不明显,使得我国当前的税制结构对收入分配的调节力度不够。     

浅析集团公司财务管理重点问题

对于集团公司财务管理,为了实现集团总价值最大化的目标,重点在于解决三个问题:一是经营战略上专业化与多元化的协调;二是财务控制中的集权与分权的权衡;三是决策的程序化与灵活性。     

Trust and recognition: a comparative study of client attitudes and workers' experiences in the welfare services

Since professional conduct is important in the lives of many people, trust and recognition between professionals and their clients are critical. Social professionals administer public resources on behalf of the welfare state, and their approaches and methods of intervention are mostly founded in current welfare policy. Despite this mandate, social professionals receive little acknowledgement and recognition. This article investigates the level of public trust in the Norwegian social services compared to the national insurance agencies, and to what extent the providers of these welfare services experience recognition and public approval. A central question is whether these aspects of external appreciation influence the professionals' motivation and feelings of accomplishment. Findings indicate that the social services receive less public support than the social insurance agencies, owing to the discretionary services provided and the stigma related to social assistance. The variation in institutional trust is reflected by the differences in workers' subjective experiences. That result notwithstanding, the service providers reveal a split view of themselves: while they experience themselves positively with respect to involvement and pride in their work, they also see themselves through the deprecating eyes of the public.     

Civic-secular and ethnic nationalisms as bases of the nation-state: multiculturalism at the crossroads? 1

The dominant Eurocentric paradigm of the nation and the nation-state was premised on western historical experience that was indigenous to the west but claimed universality for the rest. Many post-colonial countries, particularly those that went through national liberation struggles, like India and China, with multi-ethnic mobilisations, established sovereign states. The nationalist leaders claimed the unity of nationhood for their culturally diverse countries (states), with their millennia-deep civilisational identity, compelling a new discourse on the untenability of the classic Eurocentric paradigm. The second development witnessed the inevitable cultural heterogenisation of the western countries premised on the expansion of the (immigrant) labour market through an ever-enveloping regime of economic liberalisation and world trade. The catharsis of the invasion of cheaper labour from culturally diverse countries, often native-displacing, resulted in western countries attempting to accommodate the emerging changing reality in the context of mono-cultural nations through the concept and policy of multiculturalism. In spite of this, western countries have been witness to intercultural violence, racial discrimination and threats of home grown terrorism. The paper seeks to distinguish between ‘pluralism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ and argues for a reformulation of the concept of the nation-state that will have greater applicability across states.     

The Middle‐class in the German Welfare State: Beneficial Involvement at Stake?

The working‐class is typically regarded as the driving force of welfare state development. Yet, some argue that the middle‐classes' beneficial involvement in the welfare state is crucial for its financial sustainability and popular legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how recent welfare state reforms in Germany which affect the status of the middle‐class are viewed and discussed by this group. Germany is a particularly interesting case because its welfare state is seen to be centred on the desires of the middle‐class, especially through its focus on status maintenance and horizontal redistribution over the life‐course. However, the move from status maintenance to minimum income support in unemployment provision and the strengthening of private old age provision challenge this assumption. Thus, we ask how the German middle‐class views the emerging abandonment of the principle of status maintenance and the shift from collective to individual responsibility. Based on qualitative material from focus groups, we find that individual responsibility is generally supported, but that the state is still assigned responsibility for providing basic levels of social security. Furthermore, for those groups seen as less capable of acting individually responsible (e.g. the poor or long‐term unemployed) the ‘inducement’ of – or assistance for – individually responsible behaviour by the state is demanded. Overall, while the principle of ‘individual responsibility’ seems to find some resonance among the middle‐class members interviewed, they still try to balance individual and collective responsibility.     

Activation,Public Employment Services and their Clients: The Role of Social Class in a Continental Welfare State

This article fills a gap in the existing literature by investigating how public employment service (PES) staff actually deal with their clients under a continental regime of activation. The results reported here are based on interviews both with PES staff and their unemployed clients in Germany. We argue that due to its Bismarckian origins as an insurance‐based system of ‘unemployment protection’, Germany's system of unemployment compensation is attractive not only for the marginalized, but also for core workers. As a result, PES staff deal with clients from very heterogeneous class backgrounds. We demonstrate that social class is a significant factor in client outcomes, and that earlier research has perhaps overemphasized the role of frontline staff as ‘street‐level bureaucrats’. While staff do have considerable power, the result of the encounters between the administration and clients also depends on the capabilities of the clients, which, in turn, are strongly related to social class.     

The Great Recession and Welfare State Reform: Is Retrenchment Really the Only Game Left in Town?

By 2010, when the Greek sovereign debt crisis changed into an existential crisis of the euro, all developed democracies entered a phase in which they had to consolidate their budgets, typically implying a politics of austerity. The scholarly literature, as well as the popular press, suggests that – consequently – welfare retrenchment and cost containment became the only games left in town. In this article, we study the welfare state reform measures taken between 2010 and 2012 in four countries characteristic of mature welfare state regimes (liberal, UK; conservative, Germany; social democratic, Denmark; and hybrid, the Netherlands) to examine empirically whether austerity has indeed become the only item left on the policy menu. Our analysis reveals that retrenchment features prominently on the agenda everywhere, but nowhere by itself. While compensation for income loss is rare since 2010, this still happens. More unexpectedly, reforms in line with a social investment agenda (like expansion of child care or active labour market policies) are still being pursued in all our four cases.     

公共投资政策的社会福利成本

政府的公共投资政策对决定经济增长和社会福利水平起着关键的作用。本文研究了不同公共投资政策的福利成本。我们在一个存在基础设施资本和私人资本的内生增长框架内,给出了计算经济从非均衡状态过渡到平衡增长路径这个过程中的社会福利的方法,比较了不同公共投资政策相对于帕累托最优经济而言给社会带来的福利成本,并分析了影响福利成本的各种因素。政府的最优公共投资政策是使得福利成本最小的政策;在一定条件下,政府短期内可以采取推动型政策以有效地改变经济结构,从而为长期经济增长创造条件,改善社会福利。