Transcript Slides - Rosella Nicolini

Social Policy
and
Aid, Trade and Economic Development
of the EU
• Welfare state:
General objective: improve human living conditions
Actions: state-sponsored programmes.
Concrete purposes:
- Preventing/Alleviating poverty
- Redistributing income across the life course
- Offset special needs of groups with disables people and
families
In the EU the nation-state remains responsible for providing and
financing social services and social transfers.
Welfare regimes:
- Government can establish specialized public agencies
- Governement outsources provisions to private organizations
Tax financed social trasfers account for between 10-20% of
GDP of EU Member countries
Gross vs disposable income
Three types of welfare:
Liberal
• Celebrate property/ market
• Liberal regimes impose a line between self-reliant citizens and
those that depend on the State (Puritanism)
• Education-Health care: marked by the class division
• Social security/Social housing: protect the poor
• Flexible labour market
• Governements: trade-off between pressure for increased social
expenditure and low level of tax tolerance.
Three types of welfare:
Conservative
• Capitalism is welcomed as an engine of economic growth but
social transfers are used to compensate market losers and preserve
social cohesion.
• Interventions are managed by representatives of employers and
workers.
• Social democratic regimes: social insurance and social partnership
are in an egalitarian scheme of social citizenship.
•The State plays a primary role in providing citizens with highest
suitable degree of income secuity and high quality services.
Three types of welfare:
Social democratic system
• Social transfers are designed to foster social solidarity based on
commitment to the ideal of pepole’s home.
• All citizens are entitled to a tax-financed basic retirement pension
with earning related pensions (unitary national insurance scheme).
What’s about EU ?
• Differences across EU regimes: very complicated to
harmonize
• Countries with generous social standards are less prone
to scale down their workers’ entitlements to social
benefits
• Publishing some EU Directives...
Future perspectives:
• Families are increasingly fragile
• Motherhood and employment status
• Social exclusion
• Retirement scheme
Aid, Trade and Economic Development
EU position in the international network:
• Historical ‘heritage’ : France and UK have a network of
low/medium income economies
Aids:
- Recipients accepts for a variety of reasons
- Scope: develop a project or addressed to an agency
Lines of interventions:
• Complementarieties with other programmes implemented by
the EU countries.
• Coordination between EU and Member States
• Coherence and consistency of all external activity
Mainstream objectives:
• Promotion of Human Rights, gender equality, environment...
• Infrastructures
• Preferential Trade Agreements.
Some data....