The formation of social insurance institutions of the Baltic States in the post-socialist era

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the differences that have emerged in the social insurance systems of the three Baltic countries since they regained their independence. It assesses how closely the institutional structures of social insurance in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania approximate to various ideal types of social security institutions to be found in the research literature. The findings indicate that, in general terms, the social security system of Estonia and Latvia can be labelled as a mix of the basic security and corporatist model, even if there are also some weak elements of the targeted model. In contrast, it appears that the institutional changes developing in the social security system of Lithuania have led to a combination of the basic security and targeted models of welfare. Even if they started with identical social security institutions inherited from the Soviet period, there is not only similarity, but also diversity in how these countries are now addressing problems in the social policy field.

Assessing labour strength in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia: How to explain the differences?

“…Thus, for instance, these authors used the sample of Visegrad countries, Baltic countries and Slovenia to show the differences among their labour unions. Finally, the approach used by several authors is the one that compares countries either on the basis of the common feature (accession to the EU in 2004: Aidukaite, 2011) or on an intraregional basis (Baltic states: Aidukaite, 2004Aidukaite, , 2006Post-Yugoslav area: Arandarenko, 2001;Stanojević, 2003;Grdešić, 2007Grdešić, , 2008Grdešić, , 2015Crowley & Stanojević, 2011). The latter approach will be used herein.…”

Post-Communist Welfare Capitalisms: Bringing Institutions and Political Agency Back in

“…We define the EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States (namely, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia in our sub-sample) as state-enabled market economies characterised by a mix of market-enabling state interventions and policy-making (Cerami, 2006;Aidukaite, 2006;Bohle and Greskovits, 2007;Hancké, Rhodes and Thatcher, 2007;Lane and Myant, 2007;Fuchs and Offe, 2009;Golinowska, Hengstenberg and Żukowski, 2009;Lendvai, 2009;Nölke and Vliegenthart, 2009;Żukowski, 2009). These post-communist states have leaned towards a laissez-faire approach to economic growth combined with policies to promote social cohesion.…”

“…3 Going more into details, the countries in Central and Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) have developed systems of social protection that are marked by considerable variation in terms of whether they offer a residual or comprehensive (see Aidukaite, 2006;Inglot, 2008;Cerami and Vanhuysse, 2009), sometimes "premature" (Kornai, 1980), social protection system, and whether they are marked by a generally non-polarised or non-captured form of access to benefits. These considerations involve old-age pensions, but also protection against unemployment and against employment-related injuries, access to health care, to meanstested benefits, to family policies, to maternity leave, and so on.…”

“…In terms of Central and Eastern Europe, Deacon (1992) described Poland as a "post-communist conservative corporatist" welfare state, Czechoslovakia as a "social democratic" model, while Hungary was seen as a "liberal welfare regime" (see also Ferge, 2001). For Aidukaite (2006Aidukaite ( , 2010, Cerami (2006) and Żukowski (2009), the ten new Eastern EU member states can be described in terms of a distinct post-communist welfare regime type, while for Szalai (2005), Gans-Morse and Orenstein (2006) and Fuchs and Offe (2009), a mixture of corporatism and liberalism or of corporatism and social democracy (Fenger, 2007) is the main characteristic of these countries. Other more diversified categorisations also exist.…”

“…The paper seeks to complement a growing contemporary literature on political economy (see Bohle and Greskovits, 2007; Hancké, Rhodes and Thatcher, 2007; Lane and Myant, 2007;Nölke and Vliegenthart, 2009; Myant and Drahokoupil, 2010) with emerging research on welfare states in transition (see Aidukaite, 2006Aidukaite, , 2009Aidukaite, , 2010Cerami, 2006;Deacon and Stubbs, 2007;Inglot, 2008). In line with Cook (2007Cook ( , 2010aCook ( , 2010b and Haggard and Kaufman (2008), we argue that political economy matters, but that there is a need, within this, to explore the role of political elites in the development of welfare…”