The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism traces how individuals fare over time in each of the three principal types of welfare state. Through a unique analysis of panel data from Germany, the Netherlands and the US, tracking individuals' socio-economic fate over fully ten years, Goodin, Headey, Muffels and Dirven explore issues of economic growth and efficiency, of poverty and inequality, of social integration and social autonomy. It is common to talk of the inevitability of tradeoffs between these goals. However, in this book the authors contend that the social democratic welfare regime, represented here by the Netherlands, equals or exceeds the performance of the corporatist German regime and the liberal US regime across all these social and economic objectives. They thus argue that, whatever one's priorities, the social democratic welfare regime is uniquely well-suited to realizing them.

/pdf/the-real-worlds-of-welfare-capitalism-rlx59j0o3o.pdf

The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

Trust and Governance

This study has two principal objectives. The first objective is to measure and compare the performance of European railways. The second objective is to illustrate the usefulness of econometric distance functions in the analysis of production in multioutput industries, where behavioural assumptions such as cost minimization or profit maximization, are unlikely to be applicable. Using annual data on 17 railways companies during 1988–1993, multioutput distance functions are estimated using corrected ordinary least squares (COLS). The resulting technical efficiency estimates range from 0.980 for the Netherlands to 0.784 for Italy, with a mean of 0.863. The distance function results are also compared with those obtained from single-output production functions, where aggregate output measures are formed using either total revenue or a Tornqvist index. The results obtained indicate substantial differences in parameter estimates and technical efficiency rankings, casting significant doubt upon the reliability of ...

Technical efficiency of European railways: a distance function approach

The degree of inequality in the levels of well-being of its citizens tells us a great deal about a society It enables us to judge its social and economic system, to identify those citizens with a claim on community compassion, to identify the sources of hardship, and to devise strategies for reducing levels of hardship The value of such information is undoubted But we confront a severe practical problem in first defining, and then measuring, what we mean by well-being It is surely multi-dimensional, and difficult to reduce to a scalar-valued index

Resources and functionings: a new view of inequality in australia

Institutional quality, green innovation and energy efficiency

In the late 1980's, Australians were indeed Living Decently although this was not the general world-wide perception. Material affluence was at an all-time high and Australia was considered a world leader in social mobility. Unpersuaded by the gloom and doom accounts of ever-increasing poverty and the poor quality of life in Australia, the authors set out to examine the measures used in these accounts and concluded that they make it difficult to reach any conclusion other than a gloomy one. Here, the authors have designed better quantitative measures of material well-being and poverty, and then have used them to gain a more accurate and more encouraging picture of how Australians were living in the late 1980s. From this accurate analysis the authors make recommendations on how Australians can live as well in the future as they have in the past.

Living Decently: Material Well-Being in Australia

Quasi-markets for the social services

The causes of poverty in rural China have been explained in a variety of ways. These explanations include poor natural endowments, a high dependency ratio and inadequate capital and education. These explanations are examined using a unique set of survey data.

Peter Travers

Papers

Resources and functionings: a new view of inequality in australia

Living Decently: Material Well-Being in Australia

Quasi-markets for the social services

Rural Poverty and Its Causes in China

Averages and Tails: The Tenuous Link Between Poverty Status and Standard of Living