Introduction : Federalism and the welfare state / Herbert Obinger, Francis G. Castles and Stephan Leibfried -- Australia : federal constraints and institutional innovations / Francis G. Castles and John Uhr -- Canada : nation-building in a federal welfare state / Keith Banting -- The United...

The containment of social expenditure growth has been (and still is) a core issue of public policy in advanced industrial countries since the 1980s and has received much academic attention during that period. Among the most extensively discussed explanatory factors of social expenditure are...