Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America

Abstract

Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.

Sectarianism and the Ambiguities of Welfare in Lebanon

“…Much of this work focuses on the role of the state in assuring social protection and providing or regulating the provision of social services (Brooks 2009;Haggard and Kaufman 2008;Rudra 2008;Seekings 2008) or on the growing importance of international NGOs (Fox and Brown 1998;Mercer 2002;Tearney 2007). Yet the landscape of providers is far more variegated, and the boundary between state and nonstate actors in the realm of welfare is far more porous than such accounts imply (Cammett and MacLean 2014;Gough and Wood 2004). A wide variety of local actors offer basic services and help people to manage lifecycle risks.…”

Social Policy and State Revenues in Mineral-Rich Contexts

“…The comparison of clusters of MDCs based on their expenditure levels, before and after adding the effect of mineral wealth (measured by the ratio of mineral exports to total exports), shows that mineral wealth reinforces the regional patterns of welfare regimes found by Gough et al (2004) for selected groups of countries. Furthermore, patterns become clearer.…”

“…Following the path traced by Powell and Barrientos (2004) and Gough et al (2004) in their cluster analyses of welfare regimes, we use detailed data from WHO to construct MDC welfare regime clusters. The point of departure for cluster analysis is the presumption that countries are aggregated based on their welfare mix, approximated by the composition of health expenditure.…”

Buddhist Charities and China's Social Policy

“…However, their discussion on social policy in Asia offers very little on the role of religion. This reflects the scholarship on the role of religion in East Asian social policies, which sometimes refer to a Confucian welfare model and emphasize the role of family, but seldom pays attention to religious institutions (Walker and Wong, 2005;Gough, 2004;White, Goodman, and Kwon, 1998). This neglect is all the more baffling considering the importance of religion in the politics of the region, a reality that has been observed in studies of transition to democracy in Asia (Cheng and Brown, 2005).…”