Publisher's Synopsis
While mature welfare states are being trimmed and privatized, new social welfare arrangements are implemented in formerly communist and newly industrialized countries. The papers in this volume, the second in a newly established series, published for the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security (FISS) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, bring together these different worlds, but also different academic approaches. Micro-economic analyses of social insurance and welfare systems are joined with broader political descriptions of social policy in such disparate regions as Scandinavia, China, Italy, Poland and South Africa. They give the reader a sense of the fundamental problem of finding a social welfare system that fits specific economic and cultural conditions.
