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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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When is a change big enough to be a system shift?
— small system-shifting changes in German and Finnish pension policies | | Author(s) | Karl Hinrichs, Olli Kangas |
| Journal title | Social Policy & Administration, vol 37, no 6, Special issue, December 2003 |
| Pages | pp 573-591 |
| Keywords | Pensions ; Private pensions ; Social policy ; Germany ; Finland. |
| Annotation | Since the publication of G Esping-Andersen's "The three worlds of welfare capitalism" (1990) and of Paul Pierson's "Dismantling the welfare state?" (1994), comparative welfare state research has revolved around the retrenchment of social policy and the transformation of welfare state regimes. One of the chief problems of these studies is the treatment of time. Very often, changes are incremental and their real impacts are not immediately visible, but take years or even decades before the consequences fully materialise. This paper discusses those incremental processes - that consist of series of smaller "not-system-shifting changes" - which may gradually change central features of a welfare state. Pension programmes, spanning long time periods, provide a good example. Pension reform policies in Germany and Finland will be used to answer the question of when a change is big enough to be labelled as a system shift. It is argued that small "not system-shifting" changes of the last two decades will eventually alter the basic characteristics of old-age security in both countries. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-031118201 A |
| Classmark | JJ: JK: TM2: 767: 76L |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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