Title:	The Individual and the Welfare State
Authors:	Viola Angelini Radim Bohacek Axel Bo¨rsch-Supan Martina Brandt Karsten Hank Mathis Schro¨der
Keywords:	The Individual
Issue Date:	2011
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	Health and employment are key determinants of our well-being. They are major objectives of the European welfare state, e.g. of the Lisbon agenda. Yet, health and employment vary tremendously across Europe. This variation is particularly large at older ages when the sum of influences over the entire life course expresses itself. One example is “healthy life expectancy”, a statistic computed by the World Health Organization (WHO 2004) which describes the years from birth to a major disabling health event. It varies by more than 10 years in the European Union. It differs to an astounding extent even across the most highly developed countries. For example, the Swiss enjoy more than three more healthy years of life than residents in Great Britain. Well known are also the large differences in the share of older individuals who still participate in the labour market. That share, referring to those aged between 55 and 64, varies between 37.2% in Belgium and 74.0% in Sweden (OECD Employment Outlook 2010). Similarly, the share of employed women in all ages varies between 51.1% in Italy and 77.3% in Denmark. That variation has been even greater in the past such that the share of women with their own pensions varies greatly within Europe. Why are these differences so pronounced? To what extent have these differences been created by policy interventions? The first aim of this book is to shed light on the specific mechanisms through which welfare state interventions may be responsible for these large international differences in health and employment at older ages. More ambitiously, a second aim is to translate such findings into improved policy design in the European welfare states. This is actually not a new topic. Meters of shelf space have been filled with analyses of the welfare state and their policy implications. This book, however, presents an innovative and eye-opening approach to those still most important questions. The common main innovation of the 23 analytical chapters in this book is a combination of life-history micro data with a macro data base of historical welfare state interventions. All chapters are based on the new third wave of one of the most promising cross-national longitudinal data bases currently available, the data of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE; see B€orsch-Supan et al. 2005, 2008). We will first explain why our methodological innovations open new roads to welfare state analysis. The then following section gives an executive summary of each analytical chapter. The final section of this introduction draws our main conclusions.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/50947
ISBN:	978-3-642-17472-8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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