Social welfare model

Form of social welfare
interaction between members of a state

A social welfare model is a system of social welfare provision and its accompanying value system. It usually involves social policies that affect the welfare of a country's citizens within the framework of a market or mixed economy.

Taxation is concerned with how the state taxes the people, whether by a flat tax, regressive tax or a progressive tax system. The most common guiding rule of taxation is to levy taxes by the ability to pay.

Social insurance is concerned with how the state implements benefits for the unemployed, pensions, maternity and paternity leave and disabilities.

Services such as health care can be almost entirely state funded, private insurance based, or somewhere in between. For example, the United Kingdom has an almost entirely publicly funded health service, the National Health Service (NHS), and Canada offers public health care offered at a provincial level. Conversely, in the United States, individuals have to rely on health insurance policies in the event of hospitalization, and a minimal amount of state support for the poorer people exists. Another element can be public transport, as some countries have nationalized rapid transit systems, while others have privatized them (in the UK for example, public transport has been privatised in Great Britain but not in Northern Ireland).

Economies with a more laissez faire approach to employment will do nothing to provide job security. Other countries will rely on some degree of regulation to protect workers from arbitrary firings. A high degree of regulation such as expensive severance fees is often cited reason for making employers reluctant to hire and causing unemployment.

Used by the UK, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the South Asian countries the British model tends to have a welfare state of roughly average size, relative to high income OECD countries, but less comprehensive than those in Scandinavia and much of continental Europe. They have somewhat more poverty and higher inequality. Despite having a smaller welfare state than most Western European countries, the UK, Ireland and Canada do provide, among other things, universal single payer health care, redistribute income and guarantee an income at subsistence level.

Used by Austria, France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Continental model has strict rules on job protection and a large amount of regulation in industry. However, the labour market has proven to be inflexible and slow to react to globalization. Generous insurance based unemployment benefits and a well funded welfare state are used to reduce poverty and provide high quality health care. This model can generally be seen as middle ground between the British and Nordic models.

Used by Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, the Mediterranean model is similar to the Continental model, but focuses welfare on generous state pensions. The labour market is inflexible with the same job protectionism as in the Continental model, but is not good at reducing poverty within the lower end of society.

The Nordic Model, mainly refers to Nordic countries Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland but some include the Netherlands, also called 'Nordic corporatist' model because of strong influence of the corporatist elements such as labor unions and employers' organizations, advocates a highly developed and government funded welfare state which provides generous unemployment benefits among other resources for the general public. Labor markets are kept mobile with easy firing and hiring, and government taking care of those laid off with unemployment benefits and retraining. The equality of the Nordic model is achieved through progressive taxation. As a result of the policy, Sweden, Denmark and Norway have the lowest income disparities in the world. Nordic countries have been enjoying high economic and productivity growth, but most remarkably they consistently conquer top spots in world happiness surveys. The welfare systems within the Nordic Model also emerge as highly rated in many standard international comparisons of welfare or well being (e. g. World Economic Forum 2020). However, as a limited critique, some Nordic based welfare and gender researchers have argued that such assessments, based on conventional welfare/well being criteria, may to some extent over privilege the Nordic countries in terms of, for instance, gender and racial equality. For example, they suggest that if one takes a broader perspective on well being incorporating issues associated with bodily integrity or bodily citizenship (Pringle 2011), then some major forms of men’s domination and/or white privilege can be seen to still stubbornly persist in the Nordic countries, e. g. business, violence to women, sexual violence to children, the military, academia and religion (Hearn and Pringle 2006; Hearn et al. 2018; Pringle 2016)