Crecimiento y redistribución en el estado de bienestar

To have an orderly debate on the so-called 'crisis of the Welfare State' is as necessary as it is complicated. It would be vain to try in few lines to give such an answer. But it can be useful however, to approach a more modest aim such as answering the following question: Is there a relationship between economic growth ant the development of the Welfare State?. An answer shared by economists almost unanimously, is the following: A mature Welfare State cannot be sustained in the long term in demographic stagnant and weak economic growth scenarios. In this framework, the long-term growth can only finance a Welfare State smaller than the present one. However, to state that the public sector is either too big or too small is something unfounded, because the State works in different ways in very different economic environments. Regarding social expenditure in concrete, following the debate in the study, there is a weight of the Welfare State which maximizes the growth of income per capita in the mid term. It seems that the aims of growth and to reach high levels of income per capita require the involvement of the Welfare State, though the dimension of western public sectors seems to be well above the optimum.