Estonia is widely regarded as a paramount example for a successful transformation of a socialist economic system to a functioning market economy. Against the backdrop of this positive image which contrasts strongly with the crisis scenarios in Southern Europe the remaining problems of Estonia...

The analyses of the national reforms in the welfare states over the last decades were partly focused on this notion of convergence. In the eighties and the nineties, the transformation in many welfare states provided a literature on the retrenchment of the welfare states which explained the...