12/12/2023 0 Comments Is carrot weather universal![]() We then focus on whether policy reforms in Italy and Spain have taken a SI direction. The next section sets the analytical framework. Hence, the question for the present contribution is whether the two aforementioned major shocks and the political and policy answers to them offer a window of opportunity for Italy and Spain to innovate their social protection systems. This finding emerged already from the first comparative studies on the topic (Morel et al, 2011 Beramendi et al, 2015). Nordic countries have been relatively more successful in the coupling whereas, at the opposite end, Southern and Central-Eastern European ones have been weaker accomplishers. Second, welfare states have been able to couple traditional policies based on income maintenance and social investment ones to different extents. Instead, advocating social investment means integrating such approach with a more traditional one based on income maintenance. First, the expansion of social investment policies should not ‘crowd-out’ traditional compensatory policies if a state wants to match economic growth and social cohesion. Typical social investments policies are education, healthcare, childcare and family services, long-term care (LTC), lifelong learning and active labour market policies (ALMPs) (Hemerijck, 2017).Ī decade-long literature on social investment (SI) has clarified two points. Almost a decade ago, the EU launched a Social Investment Package (2013) prompting member states to recalibrate their welfare systems in order to enable individuals and families to respond to the new social risks (NSRs) of a competitive knowledge economy, by investing in human capital and capabilities, instead of focusing only on traditional compensatory policies helping individuals cope with the loss of income, whether due to old age (pensions), skill redundancy (unemployment insurance) or illness (disability benefits and sick leave from employment). When we refer to policy change and recalibration in relation to welfare states, we want to assess specifically the ‘social investment turn’ (Morel et al, 2011 Hemerijck, 2017 Busemeyer et al, 2018). ![]() The cumulative effect of these two major shocks could represent a ‘critical juncture’ (Kingdon, 1995) for the transformation of their welfare states and political economies. We focus our empirical analysis on Italy and Spain, two countries among the hardest hit by both the Great Recession (GR) and the COVID-19 pandemic. ![]() The aim of this article is to assess to what extent the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic and the current changes in the EU approach to member states’ economic adjustment strategies represent a window of opportunity to innovate and to plan a transformation of the European political economy systems and, more specifically, of their welfare states. Conclusions show that, at least at the level of intentions, ‘carrots’ seem to be working better than ‘sticks’ on the quest for more intense social investment in Italy and Spain. ![]() In order to evaluate the impact of new conditionality on policy outputs, the article then turns to consider the economic, social and policy legacies of the previous economic crisis and what would have been the prospects for a social investment turn in the absence of Next Generation EU funding. The study assesses the extent of social investment, as advocated by EU country-specific recommendations, of the set of measures introduced to fight the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and of programmatic documents issued by the Italian and Spanish executives, such as the State Budget Laws for 2021 and National Recovery and Resilience Plans. The analytical framework combines insights from different strands of the literature on policy change, in particular those devoted to policy legacies and to policy-making ‘conditionings’ (constraints and facilitators). This article asks whether the novel EU approach to member states’ economic adjustment strategies constitutes a ‘social investment turn’ by the Italian and Spanish welfare states. ![]()
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