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6. Social Security. The Active Welfare State: A Stylised Retrospective
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Social Security 173 Social Security the active welFare state: a stylised retrosPective Frank Vandenbroucke, with Kim Lievens1, 2 introduction Since the mid-1990s, a vast literature has been published on the need for a ‘new welfare state’, in which three core ideas resonate: new social risks, social investment, and the development of services. Unemployment, old age, ill health, sickness and disability, and the financial burden of raising children were seen as constituting the ‘old’ risks, which had been increasingly catered for by welfare states since the Second World War. In the category of new social risks one might list the following (Bonoli, 2006): (i) the impossibility of reconciling family responsibility and paid labour; (ii) single parenthood; (iii) long-term care dependency of a family member; (iv) poor or inadequate schooling; (v) insufficient coverage by social security, e.g. because of lack of access to an adequately insured insider position on the labour market. The second core idea, social investment , emphasises that it is better to prevent social risks than to remedy them afterwards, for example through training and activation of jobseekers , through investing in education and lifelong learning. Both goals – addressing new social risks and activation – imply that welfare states need 1. FrankVandenbroucke is Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He was Minister for Social Affairs, Pensions and Employment from 2000 to 2004. 2. We thank Jan Vanthuyne, Bea Cantillon, Kristel Bogaerts, Muriel Dejemeppe, Dirk Moens, Diana De Graeve, Michel Breda, Ri De Ridder, Nicole Fasquelle, Greet De Vil, Guy Van Camp, Koen Vleminckx,Willem Adema, Leen Meeusen, Steven Segaert, Frederic Taveirne,Tuba Bircan and Cis Caes for punctual contributions.The usual disclaimers apply. 6. 174 The Return of the Deficit to develop services, such as child care or counselling and training, next to benefits. Bismarckian welfare states, to which Belgium historically belongs, are considered to be cash-heavy, giving priority to cash transfers over social services. Scandinavian welfare states are service-heavy. The ‘new welfare state’ implied the dual ambition of modernising the welfare state, so that it would better address the new risks and needs structure of contemporary societies, and of ensuring its financial sustainability. In 1999, the Verhofstadt government proposed to turn Belgium into an ‘active welfare state’. To some extent, the active welfare state can be associated with the literature on ‘the new welfare state’. The active welfare state aimed at a combination of both ‘new risk’ policies and preventive policies, notably by activation, but it emphasised at the same time the need to maintain adequate social benefits to cater for traditional social risks (Vandenbroucke, 1999; Vandenbroucke and Vleminckx, 2011). Hence, the active welfare state was an attempt to redefine and change the orientation of social policy by developing a complementary strategy: rather than replacing the traditional functions of the welfare state, the idea was to improve them and to add new functions. As in other Bismarckian welfare states, Belgian employment and social policy is historically characterised by status-preserving distinctions, such as the distinction between blue-collar and white-collar workers and the distinction between the self-employed, employees and statutory civil servants. Would the ambition to improve traditional social programmes entail a radical departure from this legacy? During the past decade the self-employed have obtained quasi the same child benefits3 and health care reimbursement as employees and civil servants; pensions and incapacity benefits for the self-employed were significantly upgraded. These alignments were a driver of additional social expenditure without matching extra revenue.4 Specific professional groups, such as artists or onthaalmoeders/gardiennes d’enfants in the childcare sector, obtained social security coverage in a pragmatic way. Thus, Belgian social security became pragmatically universal in terms of access. One might say that 3. There still is a difference in the basic amount and the age supplement for a child of rank 1,which should be eliminated before the constitutional changes agreed by the Di Rupo government are implemented. 4. However, in health care contribution rates for the self-employed were increased. [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:12 GMT) Social Security 175 social policy thus countered the fifth risk in our list of new risks, that is, the risk of insufficient social coverage. But these ad hoc measures did not alter the fundamentally Bismarckian legacy of status-based social security pillars. Although there was mutual influence, in its conception the active welfare state was not a copy-and-paste of the literature on the...