Self-employment still forms an important element in the social structure of modern societies. However, the group of the self-employed has experienced an enormous economic and social change. After a long term decline until the beginning of the 1970s in almost all industrialised countries,...

Social services are a relatively new field of comparative welfare state research. Though comparative studies on the whole area of social services are still rare, good studies and data are available on services for elderly people and children. In almost all European countries services for the...

Recent debates about the problem-solving capacity of supranational governance within the EU form the background of this paper, which explores the causal conditions for correct and timely transposition of EU directives. In this context, some scholars have pointed to the degree of fit or misfit...