Suchergebnisse

This article aims to assess present social assistance schemes using the notion of welfare production and the concept of social rights. The focus is on how different stages of social assistance schemes are linked, and how well schemes succeed using a number of different indicators. The data are from the year 2000. The six countries that are included in the study represent different welfare state models. The findings show that there are a number of relationships between inputs, outputs and outcomes. Countries with more extensive social security schemes have less extensive social assistance schemes. The results also indicate that countries with less extensive social assistance schemes provide more generous levels of support; and simultaneously, that more generous schemes are associated with a lower prevalence of poverty. In the two Scandinavian countries that are included in the study (Finland and Sweden), social assistance schemes were the most generous from a social rights point of view.

This article analyses the importance of housing costs in cross-national comparisons of social assistance. The article explores the model family technique, the most commonly used method of comparing levels of support, and analyses the impact of housing costs on outcomes. The importance of housing costs is assessed by using different definitions of disposable income, by comparing the level of social assistance without, before and after housing costs. Three different rent levels are specified in order to evaluate the impact of housing costs and seven different family types are considered in the analysis. The countries used for comparison are Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, during the late 1990s. The findings show that housing costs have an impact on outcomes in social assistance: when housing costs are disregarded, the differences between countries are greater. The outcomes vary with different calculations of disposable income: the relative value of assistance between countries and families varies, and the ranking of countries is also altered. Different levels of housing costs have a similar impact, showing changes in the relative position of countries. Overall the findings show that taking housing costs into account makes a difference.

Most previous research on social welfare has focused on the statutory part of welfare delivery. By examining collectively-negotiated sickness benefits, this article introduces occupational welfare into cross-national analyses of social policy and explores how this changes the Nordic welfare model. Instead of limiting its focus to one average worker wage, the article examines five different occupations representing both low-skilled and high-skilled workers, as well as public and private sector employees. Using the stylised case method and examining three different durations of sickness, the study shows that employees in different occupations have different rights in relation to occupational benefits during sickness. Although the results found by the analysis vary with length of sickness, the article concludes that, in general, occupational welfare has a reinforcing effect on the existing differences between occupations generated by public benefits. The analysis presents evidence of not-so-equal aspects of the Nordic welfare model.

In the universalistic Nordic welfare states, targeted anti-poverty policies have not been considered as specific aims of social policy. The situation has, however, altered in Finland and there is now a new element in Finnish social policy that can be called 'anti-poverty policy'. This article explores when, how and why the policy paradigm relating to poverty changed in Finland. It includes an empirical analysis of the documents produced by key actors. Analyses show that the basic idea behind the policy prescriptions for alleviating poverty in Finland has changed from the idea of universalism to the idea of selectivism. The results emphasise that the Church, non-governmental organisations, the European Union's Lisbon agenda as well as an active opposition politics had an important agenda-setting role behind the ideational turn from universalism to the idea of selectivism.

Abstract
The aims of this study were to explore patterns of work and retirement of Finnish employees and self-employed persons in a pension system with a flexible old-age retirement age and how income develops in these patterns. We used individual-level register data from Statistics Finland of the total Finnish birth cohort born in 1949. The cohort was 62–70 years old over the study period 2011–2019. Sequence and cluster analyses were used to identify typical trajectories of individuals' transitions in and out of salaried work and self-employment and work in old-age retirement. Our analysis yielded a ten-cluster solution: four clusters were found for employees who did not continue working in retirement (62%), four clusters for those employees who continued working in retirement (26%), and two clusters for the self-employed (12%). The clusters differed by the timing of retirement. The results showed that employees who retired earlier on an old-age pension and who were not working afterwards had lower incomes. Their incomes also decreased after old-age retirement. Employees who worked for several years in retirement had higher incomes which remained stable between the ages of 62 and 70. We found two types of self-employed persons: those who continued working in retirement with high incomes and those who stopped working earlier and had lower incomes. The results indicate that inequalities between lower and higher income groups might become exacerbated in a flexible retirement system.