The basic aim of this paper is to assess existing welfare regimes in the countries of European Union before and after the enlargement of May 2004 (EU 15 and EU 25) building on a comprehensive approach that considers different dimensions of welfare through an extended set of variables. The paper...

Cross-national studies on happiness have focused on differences in level of happiness. The focus of this paper is on spread in happiness in the nation, also called ‘inequality in happiness’. Inequality in happiness in nations can be measured by the size of the standard deviation of responses...

Within the course of the 20th century the American population went through a metamorphosis from being the tallest in the world, to being among the most overweight. The American height advantage over Western and Northern Europeans was between 3 and 9 cm in the middle of the 19th century....

The main issue of this article is to discuss the question of ‘precarity’ in the context of the theory of social quality (see Beck et al, 2001), with which to pave the way for developing further the theoretical foundation of precarity. Societal practice is the main challenge this concept...

The author wants to note that welfare reform is but one part of what is happening politically to gender relations, to women, and to poor mothers, even within the system of income support, in the United States. Of particular importance within income support is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC),...

The "new politics of the welfare state", the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries in their capacity to pursue contentious measures and...

All pension systems have been affected by the financial and economic crisis, although in different ways. This paper analyses the effects of the crisis on pension systems and the resulting responses and changes, and offers a theoretical interpretation of these responses. This interpretation...

This paper discusses the emergence of a new model of welfare and social assistance in Central and Eastern Europe. It starts by briefly summarizing the most recent social policy developments occurring in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia...

Today the European welfare states are strongly challenged and it is heavily debated how much social security a society should provide and how much private insurance is possible. This article goes back to the origins of the German welfare state. In the 1830s, industrialists from the district of...