The world politics of social investment : welfare states in the knowledge economy

Abstract

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policy-makers' main response has been to modernise welfare states by focusing on future-oriented social investment policies that focus on creating, mobilising, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. This is the first of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume develops a theory on the political and socio-economic conditions for the development of social investment policies around the globe, and studies the impact of the explanatory factors on the empirical variety of social investment reforms (and non-social investment reforms).