Changing Welfare States

Anton Hemerijck was director of the Netherlands Council for Government Policy (WRR) between 2001 and 2009. In that period he also held a Chair in Comparative European Social Policy, Department of Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He studied economics at Tilburg University (1979-1986). He obtained his doctorate from Oxford University in 1993. He publishes widely on issues comparative social and economic policy and institutional policy analysis. Between 1997 and 2000 he was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the study of societies, working on the large comparative project on welfare and work in the open economy, directed by Fritz W. Scharpf and Vivien A. Schmidt. He is Professor of Institutional Policy Analysis and Vice-Rector of International Affairs at VU University, Amsterdam.

• List of Figures ; List of Tables ; List of Abbreviations ; 1. The Adaptive Capacities of Welfare States ; 2. The New Politics of the Welfare State Revisited ; 3. Challenges to Twenty-First Century Social Policy Provision ; 4. Welfare Recalibration as Social Learning ; 5. Three Waves of Transformative Welfare State Change ; 6. Welfare Recalibration in Motion ; 7. Welfare Performance at a Glance ; 8. Escaping the Double Bind of Social Europe ; 9. Stress-Testing Welfare Regimes, Once Again ; 10. In Defence of Affordable Social Investment ; Bibliography ; Index

This is a solid, priceworthy overview of recent welfare state developments in the European Union. In other words, it is a recommendable textbook for courses on European social policy ... you will benefit from learning professor Hemerijck's knowledge about European social policies in the 1990s-2000s.