Suchergebnisse

Over the past two decades, a decline in birth rates in advanced industrialized societies to levels well below those required for population replacement has been accompanied by a major change in the cross-national incidence of fertility. This has, in turn, given rise to a massive transformation in traditional cross-national patterns of relationships between fertility and other variables. Whereas previously the countries with the highest period fertility rates were those in which family-oriented cultural traditions were most pronounced and in which women's labour market participation was least, these relationships are now wholly reversed. This study uses data for 21 OECD countries to provide a more thorough and systematic mapping of the linkages between fertility, cultural values, economic structure and social policy than has hitherto been attempted in the literature, while simultaneously addressing some of the theoretical and methodological issues that arise in explaining a reversal of this magnitude. It argues that seemingly anomalous linkages with cultural traditions and employment structure are consequences of women's changing work and family preferences and of cross-national differences in the adoption of family-friendly public policy.

This paper starts from a major contradiction in the literature on recent public sector development. On the one hand, globalisation theory is read as implying major tendencies towards the retrenchment of the public sector and a 'race to the bottom' in social spending. On the other, comparative studies are largely unanimous in arguing that such tendencies have not occurred. To gain greater purchase on the realities of recent public sector trends, we disaggregate data for public expenditure change in 19 OECD countries over the period 1984 to 1997. We then develop a series of models of the factors determining expenditure trends over this period. The findings presented here provide no evidence that exposure to international trade leads governments to downsize their public sectors and suggest that the main influences on contemporary expenditure patterns have been unemployment, economic growth and catch-up. from prior expenditure level.

For much of the post-war period, the Australian welfare state has been misunderstood by overseas social policy commentators. The lack of generosity of welfare payments has been substantially compensated for by a system of wages regulation which has prevented waged poverty and delivered a reduced dispersion of incomes. The strong emphasis on means-testing of benefits has not had the stigmatising effects of benefit selectivity elsewhere, since Australian means tests are designed to exclude the well-off rather than focus benefits exclusively on the very poor and because Australian means-testing has been non-discretionary in character. The paper notes that policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s, and, most particularly, under the present Liberal Coalition government, have undermined these distinctive aspects of welfare Australian-style and argues that it is no longer possible to defend the Australian welfare state from its critics.

This paper uses cross-national data for 21 OECD nations to examine whether there is any evidence of a connection between measures of political and fiscal decentralization and the major, long-term, performance parameters of the post-war political economy. The findings of what is necessarily an exploratory analysis of a wide rage of policy outcomes suggest that low levels of fiscal centralization appear to have restrained post-war inflationary pressures and gone along with higher rates of post-war economic growth. However, no evidence is found to link fiscal decentralization with post-war labour market performance. While the balance of evidence indicates that measures of political decentralization do not have any significant impact on macroeconomic outcomes, the study confirms the standard finding in the literature that federalism and other decentralized constitutional arrangements impede the expansion of the socially protective state.