The Role of European Welfare States in Explaining Resources Deprivation

In a previous paper in this journal (Headey etal., 2000) a comparison was made between threeso-called `best cases' of welfare regime types,the `Liberal' US, `the `Corporatist' Germanyand the `Social-Democratic' Netherlands. Themain conclusion was that the Social-Democraticwelfare state performed best on nearly allsocial and economic indicators that wereapplied. That paper was based on the ten-yeardatasets drawn from the national socio-economicpanel studies. For this paper we use the uniquecomparative panel dataset of the EuropeanCommunity Household Panel. At the time ofresearch, only three waves of data covering the1994–96 period were available. Instead of threecountries representing three different welfarestate types as in the earlier paper we covertwelve countries allowing us to distinguish afourth Southern or Mediterranean welfare regimetype and to compare the performance of the fourregimes. Compared to the Headey's et al. paperwe focus on the comparative analysis of thelevel of deprivation and pay less attention toincome poverty and inequality. Because weconsider deprivation to be part of the conceptof social exclusion (see also Atkinson et al.,2002) our results also provide evidence on howwelfare regimes across the EU cope with socialexclusion. We conclude that theSocial-Democratic welfare state does a good jobof preventing income poverty but performs lesswell in equalising levels of deprivation. Ourresults also show that the immature Southernwelfare states perform worse with respect topreventing deprivation. Trying to explainlevels of deprivation by estimating Tobit panelregressions it turned out that the impact ofregime type remains significant though limited.Common, `structural' disparities between thecountries and regimes in terms of economicwelfare, the demographic structure, and theemployment situation explain most of thevariance across countries.