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Welfare State.3 Welfare State in Europe.4 Welfare States History in Romania6 Welfare States History in Portugal..11 Bibliography14

Welfare State
In the strictest sense, a welfare state is a government that provides for the welfare, or the well-being, of its citizens completely. Such a government is involved in citizens lives at every level. It provides for physical, material, and social needs rath er than the people providing for their own. The purpose of the welfare state is to create economic equality or to assure equitable standards of living for all. The welfare state provides education, housing, sustenance, healthcare, pensions, unemployment insurance, sick leave or time off due to injury, supplemental income in some cases, and equal wages through price and wage controls. It also provides for public transportation, childcare, social amenities such as public parks and libraries, as well as many other goods and services. Some of these items are paid for via government insurance programs while others are paid for by taxes. Todays conception of welfare state implies more than simple social politics that characterised the period after industrialisation and urbanisation. According to Gsta Esping-Andersen, it represents an effort to bring about economic, moral and political reconstruction. Economically, because it was separated from the orthodoxy of the pure market nexus. In addition, the new welfare state required the extension of income and employment security as a right of the citizens. Morally, it meant to defend values as social justice, solidarity and universalism. Politically, the welfare state was part of a project of nation building, affirming liberal democracy against the twin risks of fascism and bolshevism. Hence, many countries became self-proclaimed welfare states in order to achieve national social integration.

Welfare State in Europe

The welfare state is a defining feature of Europe referring to a model of provision where the state accepts a certain amount of responsibility for the guarantee of welfare for its citizens. Currently, there is no European welfare state, but 27 member states that have different social policies, with both similarities and differences among them. Types of Welfare States: The continental welfare state (Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Austria) is characterized by the strategy of paying off social problems. The compensatory measures are predominant, together with a high degree of regulation in industry. The welfare state is the compensator of first resort, while universalism has been undermined by the institutionalized full employment promises and private labor market practices. However, the insurance-based unemployment benefits and the generous welfare funds led to the reduction of poverty and a very good health care. The Scandinavian welfare state (Sweden, Denmark, Finland), also known as the Swedish model stresses the right to work for everyone, the state being the employer of first resort. The state is in charge of financing and organizing the social benefits for the citizens and the welfare model is accompanied by both a broad basis of taxation and a high taxation burden. The Swedish model also has the adva ntage of having a more simple organization than the other European countries because most of the welfare tasks are carried out by the state and the local authorities and it is less dependent on individuals, national welfare organizations, families or churches. The Anglo-Saxon welfare model (UK, Ireland) is also called the residual welfare model and it has a low degree of job protection. It is characterized by selectivity, which translates in easy hiring and firing of employees by companies. Unemployment is kept at a much lower level than in the other member states. However, this social strategy has proven unsuccessful in reducing poverty, as the expenditures on welfare is much lower than those of the other European states (for UK it is 22% of the national budget). There have been cuts in national insurance benefits, the abolition of the link between the state pension and average earnings, incentives to transfer to private pensions, and cuts in entitlements to unemployment and disability benefits.
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The Mediterranean welfare state (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) is characterized by a rudimentary welfare state, with a strong internal polarization in social benefits. Although there is no minimum income scheme in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, the retirement benefits for the citizens who qualify are the highest in Europe. There is a class of hyper-protected individuals" (white-collar workers), but also a large number of unprotected individuals (irregular workers, young people and the long-term

unemployed). The degree of state activity in the welfare sector is extremely low and not efficient in reducing poverty at the lower end of society.

With the accession of the new 12 member states (2004 and 2007), we could say that there is another category of welfare state that could be added to the four described above: the post-communist welfare state. This type was characterized by the transition dilemma; after the separation from the communist regime the economic performance was lower than expected and the East and South-East European countries needed to find ways to respond to the demand of a better welfare, without compromising the competitiveness of their economies. Although the post-communist countries entered the transition period with a set of welfare policies which were inherited from the old system, their quality was low and encompassed many inequalities. The new member states are now still based on the service system, but they are also caught within the temptation towards the market. In the case of Romania and Bulgaria, the two states preferred to keep the welfare state intact; then they rolled it back, in order to promote macro economic efficiency and growth, and later took measures to meet the rising social costs of transition to the market system.

Welfare States History in Romania

The basic conception of welfare in Romania before 1989 was that everyone had the right and obligation to work. In order to support full employment the state provided jobs for everyone, although the place of work could be situated anywhere in the country. In this system there was no need for unemployment insurance, because everyone had the right to work. When you worked, you automatically entered into the social security system. In this way housing, free health care and many other social benefits and services represented no problem for employees. When somebody, for different reasons, refused a job, he or she had no possibility to use these services. Refusing to work was even defined as social parasitism and a delinquency that could give a prison sentence. The ideology of the Communist Party (the only official party in the country) contained the idea of a new human being, healthy and in no need for services offered by social institutions. Institutions for disabled, orphans, etc, were not officially recognised and consequently suffered from neglect by public authorities. Higher education was highly politicised, which also meant closing several university departments in the social sciences, for instance anthropology, sociology, psychology and social work. This policy was consistent with the idea that there did not exist any major social problems in the society. One consequence of this policy is the current lack of social policy experts and social workers in Romania. After the political changes in 1989, there was a short period of euphoria among the population, but it was fairly soon replaced by disappointment because of inability of the new government to implement proposed reforms. The economic development was negative, with declining production, unemployment and high inflation. GDP in 1997 was 82.3% in comparison with 1989 At the same time, many politicians tried to use the transition for personal benefits. The social effects of the transformation process in Romania have been increased inequality and poverty (even to the extent of pauperisation of large sections of the population). The transformation has meant a new social stratification, with a new
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class of rich people not necessarily connected to productive economic activity, and where large sections of the educated middle classes have experienced a social mobility downwards. During the first period of transition, this development created problems concerning the relation between reward system and the level of education and contribution to economic development. Today the situation is somewhat more stable in this respect. After the general election in 1996, the opposition came to power and announced that they would implement more thoroughgoing structural reforms. These reforms have not been popular, due to the social costs and the lack of shortterm improvements of the economy. As a result, the government from 1996 was not re-elected in the year 2000 elections. Instead, a new government, dominated by the social democratic party (a section of the party that governed before 1996) has been installed. The configuration of Communist welfare policy in Romania The basic goal of the communist welfare project was a prosperous society with a high level of homogeneity among people. Work represented a duty and a right, and welfare policy was a mix between universal benefits (accessible for all citizens) and social measures related to employment or to specific work places. Most social benefits were related to work participation in two different ways: 1. Work meant that you were eligible to receive child allowance, scholarships, holiday and treatment tickets, health care, sick and maternal leave. People outside state-regulated work had no access to these social benefits. 2. Contributions at work were defining the level of benefits; an earnings related system designed to maintain social differences. Examples of income related benefits were pensions, sick pay and paid maternal leave. Communist welfare policies used four types of welfare benefits for social support: 1.Universal transfers of benefits and services: jobs, education, free or subsidised housing, treatment tickets, subsidised prices for everyday products, for example basic goods for children and food. 2. Income-related benefits related to work contributions: the social insurance system. This earnings-related system symbolises the socialist principle of distribution,
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benefits in relation to contribution and the ideological conception of promoting the value of work. Apart from material benefits from work, the individual also got social esteem by his or her contribution to the collective welfare. 3. Social transfers dictated by needs but conditioned by employment: free health care, housing, child allowance, and free or subsidised specialised treatment or holiday tickets. 4. Targeted transfers directed to poor families, based on means tests. Additional child allowance if you had a low income, reduced treatment costs, scholarships for pupils and students from low-income families. The configuration of welfare policies focused on some basic principles related to communist ideology. The full employment policy aimed at promoting a socialist ideology that work is the most important value in society, because welfare was produced by your own contribution. Another idea was to create homogenous collective welfare using social measures against poverty. These principles were implemented through the different welfare programs mentioned above (income related social insurance, meanstested benefits for the poor). In this welfare system the enterprises where you worked were supposed to be responsible for social insurance. Special attention was given to child support, aiming to promote nativity (this policy also prohibited abortions, which was illegal). The communist system emphasised social services and subsidised consumption instead of direct money transfers. In relation to ethnicity, the policy was non-discriminatory, treating traditionally discriminated groups according to the same formula as the majority population. Transformation of social policy Important changes have occurred in Romania since the collapse of the communism. The transition from planned economy to market economy has meant high social costs for large sections of the population. One of the most important consequences is the end of full-employment. In the pre-1989 welfare system there did not exist any unemployment insurance and no social assistance. This lack of basic welfare programs needed under a capitalist market economy emerged into a social problem in Romania during the transformation, with a housing crisis, increased
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unemployment, deterioration of the social security system, and difficulties to cope with the increased prices for basic consumption, especially food. The costs of transition have affected especially poor people. So, economic inequalities have increased, creating a bigger and bigger gap between poor and rich people. UNDP National Early Warning Report ROMANIA report no. 5, May 2000 (Centre for Political Studies and Comparative Analysis) mentions the following: the Government decided to radically change the generous system of unemployment payments awarded to employees laid off as a result of company restructuring, reorganisation, privatisation, or liquidation. The government changed Emergency Ordinance no. 98/1999 to: End lump sum payments; Cut payments when a beneficiary gets a new job; Remove severance payments from the unemployment fund; Continue to pay laid off employees unemployment payments from the employer's wage fund, as per the collective labour contracts; Continue to pay unemployment to current beneficiaries; Continue to pay unemployment to those laid off by companies included in the EU Financing Memorandum of the Enterprise Restructuring and Workforce Retraining Program (RICOP). However, it will be difficult to re-balance the social insurance budget. This unemployment pay policy change has two major implications: The government is acknowledging that the former plan was wrong, since it placed a huge burden on the plans fund, forcing select payment of a minority of beneficiaries. At the end of April 2000, about 85,000 unemployed people had received almost the same amount of money spent for all of the rest, about USD 800, 000. This payment of the majority of the available funds to a relative few unemployed is not only unfair, it also ignores the lessons of the last three years, that people receiving generous unemployment benefits: have less desire to look for a new job; lack job-seeking experience, which further quells ambition;

 demand continued, generous support or government provision of a job paying at least as equally well. Another important issue discussed in the report is the reform of the pension system. Pension reform has become an issue for two main reasons. On the one hand, those who retired before 1989 receive less money than those who retired after 1989 do. On the other hand, even though a relatively small portion of budgetary expense, pensions are a financial burden that the current social security system finds increasingly difficult to shoulder. Any increase in social security payments would unbalance the budget. Consequently, the current government has no electoral support from pensioners. Nearly one million pensioners benefited of the minimum pension increase in May. However, one quarter of pensioners is still not satisfied. The reform in the Pensions System was significant in percentage terms, but only increased the actual money paid by a few hundred thousand ROL. Under the reform, the average pension represents approximately 45% of the average gross salary. The replacement ratio has increased by more than 100%, due to new pensioners that receive pensions higher than their former salaries. The gap between contributions to the fund and pensions paid can be lessened by changing system variables, ideally some combination of: raising the retirement age; raising the amount of contributions paid; cutting pension amounts; increasing the number of contributors. A structural reform of the pension system is needed more than ever. Nonetheless, changing the system alone is not enough. The current pension system requires structural reform since it is not financially viable in the long run. Private pension funds should be added to the state system, but Parliament has delayed passing the necessary legislation. This is a major mistake, since solving the pension system crisis requires time. If reform is delayed, the burden is further shifted to future generations.

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Welfare States History in Portugal

On most indices of social modernization, Portugal ranked at or near the bottom for all of Western Europe. Even in the early 1990s, despite some significant economic growth in the second half of the 1980s, Portugal remained relatively poor by West European standards. Although its range of public welfare programs was extensive, it lacked the funds to fully implement them and to pay substantial benefits. Portugal had a fairly elaborate social welfare system, including programs that provided benefits for the elderly and the seriously ill or disabled. However, the benefits paid by these programs were still quite low in the early 1990s, and an estimated 3 million Portuguese lived below the EC poverty line. The programs' benefits were financed by employee and employer contributions (roughly 10 and 25 percent, respectively). Most of the programs were the responsibility of the Ministry of Employment and Social Security and were administered by regional social security centers. The Ministry of Health was involved in programs concerned with medical care. As of the early 1990s, men and women could retire at sixty-five and sixty-two years of age, respectively, and be eligible for old-age pensions. Miners were eligible at fifty and merchant sailors at fifty-five years of age. Benefits ranged from 30 to 80 percent of recent average wages. Permanent disability and survivor benefits were also paid. Unemployment benefits could be paid from ten to thirty months and amounted to 65 percent of earnings, with a maximum of three times the national minimum wage of about US$300 a month in the early 1990s. As of 1991, maternity benefits amounted to 100 percent of the mother's pay for a period of three months, one month before and two months after the birth. Sickness benefits amounted to 65 percent of wages for up to 1,095 days; after this period, the benefit was converted to a permanent disability benefit. Accidents at work were covered by private insurance carried by employers; payments could amount to two-thirds of basic earnings. Small family allowances were paid to help rear children until they reached the age of fifteen or the age of twenty-five if they were students.
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Health conditions in Portugal were long among the poorest in Western Europe. Recent decades saw substantial improvements, however, although Portugal still lagged behind most of the continent in some categories of health care. Portuguese life expectancy at birth rose from sixty-two years for men and sixtyseven for women in 1960 to seventy-one and seventy-eight, respectively, in 1992. The country's infant mortality rate in 1970 was 58 deaths per 1,000--one of the highest in Europe and close to Third World levels--but by 1992 it had dropped to 10 per 1,000. However, the chief causes of death among the young were infectious and parasitic diseases and diseases of the respiratory system, a Third World pattern found in rural areas, as well as in city slums. Malnutrition and related diseases were also widespread. The chief cause of deaths among adults was thrombosis, followed by cancer. About 400 Portuguese died each year from tuberculosis. The number of doctors, dentists, and nurses increased greatly between 1960 and the early 1990s. At 26,400 in 1987, the number of physicians actively practicing medicine in Portugal represented a fourfold increase over the total in 1960. The number of dentists expanded even more dramatically, from 120 in 1960 to 5,700 in 1986. As of 1987, the number of medical personnel per occupied hospital bed was 1.7, compared with 0.24 in 1960. By 1990 there were 2.9 doctors per 1,000 Portuguese, a ratio higher than that found in most West European countries. However, most medical personnel were concentrated in urban centers, to the detriment of those needing health care in rural areas. In the latter areas, folk health practitioners were not uncommon, even in the early 1990s. Their medical practices were often fused with magical, religious, and superstitious elements. Portuguese were able to take advantage of a national health system that, since the second half of the 1970s, paid 100 percent of most medical and pharmaceutical expenses. The system, managed by the Ministry of Health, offered care at large urban hospitals, several dozen regional hospitals, and numerous health centers. The health centers specialized in providing primary care. Care provided by the national system ranged from the most sophisticated to basic preventive medicine. The national health system's overriding problems were the long waits, frequently months in duration, for medical care, that resulted from shortages of financial resources,
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lack of personnel, and inadequate facilities. Medical facilities in Portugal ranged from those of centuries past to the ultramodern. Partly as a result of these inadequacies, there was a substantial private medical sector that offered better care. Many doctors and other medical personnel worked in both the public and private system, often because of the low salaries paid by the national system. Much Portuguese housing was substandard, both in rural and in urban areas. Many rural villages were not electrified even by the early 1990s, and villagers often had to carry water from a common source. The influx of rural migrants to urban centers in recent decades intensified demand on an already inadequate housing supply. Although 60 percent of Portuguese rented their houses (80 percent in Lisbon and Porto), rigid rent control laws in effect between 1948 and 1985 had discouraged the construction of apartments, as did a sluggish bureaucracy. As a result, in the late 1980s an estimated 700,000 illegally constructed dwellings existed in Portugal, 200,000 of which were located in the Lisbon area. Some were built on public or unused private lands. The resulting urban shantytowns (bairros da lata) often lacked electricity, running water, or sewage systems. In Lisbon's suburbs, gigantic apartment houses were built for the more affluent new city-dwellers, but the supply of decent, affordable housing lagged far behind the demand, estimated at 800,000 dwellings for the entire country. A succession of Portuguese governments recognized this severe housing problem and sought to do something about it. For example, the National Housing Institute planned to build 70,000 dwellings a year during the 1990s, and various programs to help people become homeowners had been put into practice.

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Bibliography

Sainsbury, Diane , Gendering Welfare States , Sage Publication Ltd, 2000 Spicker, Paul, The Welfare State a general theory , Sage Publication Ltd, 2001 http://www.wisegeek.com http://www.iccv.ro http://www.suite101.com http://countrystudies.us

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