Social Policyand

Aid, Trade and Economic Development of the EU

• Welfare state:

General objective: improve human living conditions

Actions: state-sponsored programmes.

Concrete purposes:

- Preventing/Alleviating poverty

- Redistributing income across the life course

- Offset special needs of groups with disables people and families

In the EU the nation-state remains responsible for providing and financing social services and social transfers.

Welfare regimes:

- Government can establish specialized public agencies

- Governement outsources provisions to private organizations

Tax financed social trasfers account for between 10-20% of GDP of EU Member countries

Gross vs disposable income

Three types of welfare:

Liberal

• Celebrate property/ market

• Liberal regimes impose a line between self-reliant citizens and those that depend on the State (Puritanism)

• Education-Health care: marked by the class division

• Social security/Social housing: protect the poor

• Flexible labour market

• Governements: trade-off between pressure for increased social expenditure and low level of tax tolerance.

Three types of welfare:

Conservative

• Capitalism is welcomed as an engine of economic growth but social transfers are used to compensate market losers and preserve social cohesion.

• Interventions are managed by representatives of employers and workers.

• Social democratic regimes: social insurance and social partnership are in an egalitarian scheme of social citizenship.

•The State plays a primary role in providing citizens with highest suitable degree of income secuity and high quality services.

Three types of welfare:

Social democratic system

• Social transfers are designed to foster social solidarity based on commitment to the ideal of pepole’s home.

• All citizens are entitled to a tax-financed basic retirement pension with earning related pensions (unitary national insurance scheme).

What’s about EU ?

• Differences across EU regimes: very complicated to harmonize

• Countries with generous social standards are less prone to scale down their workers’ entitlements to social benefits

• Publishing some EU Directives...

Future perspectives:

• Families are increasingly fragile

• Motherhood and employment status

• Social exclusion

• Retirement scheme

Aid, Trade and Economic Development

EU position in the international network:

• Historical ‘heritage’ : France and UK have a network of low/medium income economies

Aids:

- Recipients accepts for a variety of reasons

- Scope: develop a project or addressed to an agency

Lines of interventions:

• Complementarieties with other programmes implemented by the EU countries.

• Coordination between EU and Member States

• Coherence and consistency of all external activity

Mainstream objectives:

• Promotion of Human Rights, gender equality, environment...

• Infrastructures

• Preferential Trade Agreements.

Some data....