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In recent years, Japan and Germany have been facing very similar challenges: aging populations, changing employment structures, long-lasting economic stagnation, and globalization, all of which threaten existing social security arrangements. Both countries are in a number of respects more socially and politically regulated, and in this sense less liberal, than the Anglo-American economies. Nonetheless, during the last couple of years several important social policy reforms have been implemented. A comparison of these reforms may provide valuable insights into the changing character of "conservative" welfare states. This volume concentrates on two fields of social policy: long-term care insur...
The Party's Over: The End of the Welfare State Boom in Western Europe provides the first comprehensive account of the West German Pension Reform Law 1972 (Rentenreformgesetz 1972 - RRG 1972), which marked the end of the period of rapid welfare state growth in Western Europe after World War II. Alfred C. Mierzejewski uses extensive archival research to explore how the law was conceived, how it was modified and expanded during parliamentary debate, and the effects that it had after it was enacted. Mierzejewski puts the reform into Western European context by comparing it with British and French efforts to develop their public pension systems since the seventeenth century. In doing so, The Part...
The first full-scale analysis of the history of German reunification, with a particular emphasis on social policy, showing how the transfer of the West German social policy framework to the East intensified the crisis of the German welfare state.
This collection of papers focuses on the recent pension reform experiences in Central-Eastern Europe, while starting from a broader theoretical and empirical context. It provides evidence for the political feasibility of radical pension reform, considered unlikely in the West. The approach is both multi-disciplinary and cross-regional: The book contains papers by economists, political scientists and sociologists. The authors come from Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the US. The volume consists of four parts: First, general questions of transformation and social security in post-1989 Central Eastern Europe are addressed, followed by an introduction into issues and role models in the international pension reform debate. Then, three Central European country cases are presented, analysing institutional legacies, recent reform measures and relevant political actors. A comparative section on Central-Eastern European pension reforms concludes this book.
In this multidisciplinary collection of essays, forty-eight social scientists from seven countries examine changes in the organization of work and their impact on people at various stages of the life course.
Contemporary accounts of welfare state change have produced conflicting findings and incompatible theoretical explanations. By discussing the most salient aspects of the 'dependent variable problem', this work offers suggestions as to how the problem might be tackled within empirical cross-national analyses of modern welfare states.
The ageing, financial and labour market challenges facing the old age pension systems of the member states of the European Union are well known. Those who cast doubt on the ability of the present system of pension provision - at least to the extent that it is pay-as-you-go financed - to cope with the problems posed by these challenges are getting more vociferous. Increasingly there are calls for pay-as-you-go systems to be cut back and for funded systems to be expanded. This book contests the view that funding is the answer. It shows how adaptable the largely pay-as-you-go old age pension systems in the European Union are. Actuaries, economists, lawyers, political scientists, pension adviser...
This book demonstrates that political exchange and coalition building have become the key ingredients for continental European pension reform.
A History of the German Public Pension System: Continuity amid Change provides the first comprehensive institutional history of the German public pension system from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the major reform period in the early twenty-first century. Relying on a wide range sources, including many used for the first time, this study provides a balanced account of how the pension system has coped with major challenges, such as Germany’s defeat in two world wars, inflation, the Great Depression, the demographic transition, political risk, reunification, and changing gender roles. It shows that while the pension system has changed to meet all of these challenges, it has retained basic characteristics—particularly the tie between work, contributions, and benefits—that fundamentally define its character and have enabled it to survive economic and political turmoil for over a century. This book also demonstrates that the most serious challenge faced by the pension system has consistently been political intervention by leaders hoping to use it for purposes unrelated to its mission of providing the insured with secure and adequate retirement income.
Examines the implications of the fully integrated European market