Recrafting Social Contracts: Welfare Reform in Latin America, East Asia and Central Europe

该项目的目的是解释中等收入发展中国家和前社会主义国家在社会保险(特别是养老金和医疗保险)和社会服务(基础教育和医疗服务)改革方面的独特模式。该项目的主要组成部分有三个：1)对发展中国家和前社会主义国家的全球和区域样本进行社会支出的量化分析；2)对这三个区域的重点样本1进行1980年至今社会政策改革的详细比较案例分析；3)在联邦制和分权制的样本中建立一个关于社会支出的新数据集。对福利国家的起源、扩展和性质变化的研究是发达工业国家比较政治学的中心支柱。对发展中国家社会福利政治的分析要晚得多。该项目将有关经合组织的文献的理论见解扩展到中等收入国家的样本。研究人员考虑并修改了这篇文献中的一些核心假设，包括全球化、政权类型和其他制度因素对发展中国家和前社会主义国家背景的影响。该项目的中心理论方向是考虑社会福利模式如何与三个区域更广泛的发展战略相辅相成：一些亚洲国家的出口导向型增长、拉丁美洲的进口替代和东欧的国家社会主义。研究人员考察了这些模式的转型或崩溃如何产生了围绕社会政策改革的政治冲突，以及围绕这一问题的党派冲突如何反过来影响改革路径。在拉丁美洲、阿根廷、巴西、智利、哥伦比亚、哥斯达黎加、墨西哥、秘鲁、乌拉圭和委内瑞拉；在亚洲、韩国、马来西亚、菲律宾、新加坡、台湾、泰国；在中欧、保加利亚、捷克共和国、匈牙利、波兰、斯洛伐克和斯洛文尼亚。就更广泛的社会价值而言，关于适当设计社会政策的辩论显然是一个非常重要的辩论，目标之一是促进关于政策设计的辩论。此外，该项目的数据集将用于学术、研究和非商业目的的公共领域，从而促进社会政策和权力下放的研究。

The objective of this project is to explain distinctive patterns in the reform of social insurance (particularly pensions and health insurance) and social services (basic education and health services) in a sample of middle-income developing and formerly socialist countries. The main components of the project are three: 1) quantitative analysis of social spending in global and regional samples of developing and formerly socialist countries; 2) detailed comparative case analysis of social policy reform in the period from 1980 to the present for a focused sample of cases1 from the three regions; and 3) construction of a new data set on social spending in a sample of federal and decentralized systems. The study of the origin, expansion and changing nature of the welfare state is a central pillar of the comparative politics of the advanced industrial states. Analysis of the politics of social welfare in developing countries is much more recent. This project extends the theoretical insights of the literature on the OECD to a sample of middle-income countries. The researchers consider and modify a number of core hypotheses in this literature, including the effects of globalization, regime type and other institutional factors, to the developing and formerly-socialist country context. The central theoretical orientation of the project is to consider how social welfare models were complementary to broader development strategies in the three regions: export-oriented growth in some Asian countries, import-substitution in Latin America and state socialism in Eastern Europe. The researchers examine how the transformation or collapse of these models has generated political conflict around social policy reform, and how partisan conflict over the issue has in turn influenced the reform path. The cases considered in greater depth are: in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela; in Asia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand; in Central Europe, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. For broader social value, the debate over the appropriate design of social policy is clearly a very important one, and one objective is to contribute to the debate about policy design. In addition, the data sets from this project will be put in the public domain for academic, research, and non-commercial purposes and thus facilitate research on social policy and decentralization.