The Post-Yugoslav Welfare States : From Legacies to Actor Shaped Transformations

This paper aims to to offer comprehensive insight in the two decades of transformation of the Social States of the former Yugoslavia, in particular their pension- and health-care systems, the labor markets and social inclusion policies. Based on the empirical evidence, the paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the separate welfare sectors and the factors which contributed to their development in the different states. Although it has no intention of developing a theoretical framework for the study of these welfare states, the paper does take account of the existing theories of welfare research and examines the place of these South-eastern European countries in relation to them. The policy-making described, incoherent as it may have been, has eventually created a new architecture of social security that will not be fundamentally changed in the foreseeable future. However, it is to be expected that this architecture will be confronted with plenty of demands for adjustment, extension and trimming as social and economic problems feed into political pressure. The way in which the domestic actors will balance the various pressures may be key to understanding the future welfare state developments