Välfärd

• Welfare

  The highest possible access to economic resources, a high level of well being and happiness of the citizens
• There is a measurable difference in happiness between people in poor and rich countries
• Elements of positive welfare (Giddens)

  • Active health
  • Autonomy
  • Education
  • Well-being
• Welfare state

  • Must deal with efficiency, equity, and administration
• The two levels of welfare

  • Living Standard
  • Quality of life
• Living Standard


  Material and impersonal resources, as well human relations to each other and to society, thus focusing on having, loving and being
• Quality of life

  Individuals options and possibilities to be able to choose from among set of options (Capabilities)
• Societies with higher level of equality (Nordic countries & Japan) there is less crimes, more social cohesion, higher levels of trust, people are healthier and they live longer than other countries
• Happiness

  Intended pleasure, and, the absence of pain
• Welfare state

  Difficult to define due to the term being changeable over time and empirical diversity of the welfare state
• Welfare state

  Enhancing the welfare of vulnerable groups of people in a society and observing or facilitating Social protection for all
• Ideal types / worlds of Welfare regimes

  • The Liberal USA / Anglo- Saxon model (Poor relief, private health, private pension)
  • Social democratic Sweden / Scandinavian model (Universalism, benefit, differentials)
  • Conservative Germany / continental model (Etatism, Corporatism)
• When social rights came to be a genuine function of governmental activity in western countries (twentieth century)
• The Oil crisis slowed down the development of the Welfare (1973)
• Poverty

  Individuals, families and groups can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources
• Poverty

  Failure to achieve the freedom provided by given level of capabilities
• Adam Smith : It would be ashamed if someone appeared in public without a Linen shirt
• Pensions in Sweden

  1913
• Universalism

  Social benefits for all, coverage of the national relevant population
• Generosity

  Deals with the adequacy of cash benefits and the quality of social, education, and health services
• Sweden led the way in child, family, service in social policy
• Central Europe

  European countries have their origins in the social reforms of otto van Bismarck in imperial Germany in the 1880s
• Early development of welfare systems in West Central Europe

  • The political left
  • The mobilisation
  • Conservatives and religious forces
• Insurance-based model to protect the vast majority of the population

  Strongly dependent on full (male) employment and stable family structures
• Male breadwinner / family care model


  Ferra (1996)
• Areas prioritised compared to Northwest Europe, welfare state expansion in South European countries proceeded

  • Health care
  • Social insurance
• Oliver and Barnes

  social-contextual understanding frames disability in terms of oppression, systematic discrimination, exclusion and segregation, i.e. redefining disability as socially and culturally created more than bio-medical understandings of disability.
• Williams

  states that "well in its still familiar sense an fare, primarily understood as a journey or arrival but later also as a supply of food"