IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v22y2006i3p349-364.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Generosity of Social Insurance, 1971--2002

Author

Listed:
  • Lyle Scruggs

Abstract

International comparisons of national social policy rely overwhelmingly on programme spending ratios. However, there are widespread problems with this type of data as an indicator of trends in societies' commitments to social protection. This paper suggests an alternative approach to understanding social commitments and introduces a new international data set of social insurance programmes that is comprised of important characteristics of three types of public insurance: unemployment, sick pay, and public pensions. The data are available annually from the 1970s for 18 OECD countries. Looking more closely at trends in two programme characteristics, income replacement rates and programme coverage, we develop an indicator of expected benefits. According to this indicator, there is considerably more evidence of welfare state retrenchment in recent years than most analyses of public spending have suggested. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Lyle Scruggs, 2006. "The Generosity of Social Insurance, 1971--2002," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 22(3), pages 349-364, Autumn.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:22:y:2006:i:3:p:349-364
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pallage, Stéphane & Scruggs, Lyle & Zimmermann, Christian, 2013. "Measuring Unemployment Insurance Generosity," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 21(4), pages 524-549.
    2. EL-HOUJJAJI, Hind & ECHAOUI, Abdellah, 2020. "Assessing the financial sustainability of parametric pension system reforms: The case of Morocco," MPRA Paper 98912, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Busemeyer, Marius R. & Goerres, Achim & Weschle, Simon, 2008. "Demands for redistributive policies in an era of demographic aging: The rival pressures from age and class in 15 OECD countries," MPIfG Discussion Paper 08/3, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    4. Bergh, Andreas, 2013. "Topping up and the Political Support for Social Insurance," Working Paper Series 993, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    5. Barth, Erling & Moene, Karl O. & Willumsen, Fredrik, 2015. "Reprint of "The Scandinavian model—An interpretation"," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 17-29.
    6. Koopmans, Ruud, 2008. "Tradeoffs between equality and difference: Immigrant integration, multiculturalism, and the welfare state in cross-national perspective," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Migration, Integration, Transnationalization SP IV 2008-701, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    7. Eichhorst, Werner & Feil, Michael & Braun, Christoph, 2008. "What have we learned? Assessing labor market institutions and indicators," IAB-Discussion Paper 200822, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany].
    8. Barth, Erling & Moene, Karl O. & Willumsen, Fredrik, 2014. "The Scandinavian model—An interpretation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 60-72.
    9. Bartels, Charlotte, 2012. "Long-term participation tax rates," Discussion Papers 2012/20, Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics.
    10. Fernandez, Juan J., 2010. "Economic crises, high public pension spending and blame-avoidance strategies: Pension policy retrenchments in 14 social-insurance countries, 1981 - 2005," MPIfG Discussion Paper 10/9, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    11. Lucifora, Claudio & Meurs, Dominique, 2012. "Family Values, Social Needs and Preferences for Welfare," IZA Discussion Papers 6977, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    12. Amine Samir, 2016. "The Canadian Unemployment Insurance Generosity: Reflections from a Comparative Analysis," Comparative Economic Research, Sciendo, vol. 19(3), pages 133-145, September.
    13. Laurie Beaudonnet, 2015. "A Threatening Horizon: The Impact of the Welfare State on Support for Europe," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(3), pages 457-475, May.
    14. Samia BENALLAH & Carole BONNET & Claire El MOUDDEN & Antoine MATH, 2012. "Comment Mesurer La "Générosité" Des Systèmes De Retraite ? Une Application Aux Pays De La Méditerranée," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 35, pages 215-234.
    15. repec:wsr:ecbook:2010:i:ii-008 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Lancee, Bram, 2012. "Immigrant Performance in the Labour Market: Bonding and Bridging Social Capital," EconStor Books, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 251575, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:22:y:2006:i:3:p:349-364. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.