Retrenchment or resilience? New evidence on relative social expenditure trends

Two opposing viewpoints can be found in recent literature on trends in welfare states. The first (efficiency thesis) envisages the retrenchment of the welfare state, while the second viewpoint (the ‘resilience theory’) holds that reforms and cutbacks in some parameters of social protection will be minor and will not jeopardise the essential nature of Western states. The present study makes sense in this context of hypotheses to be tested and it proposes an alternative to the measures currently available. The measure drawn up and used in this paper could be called the ‘synthetic relative standards of protection measure’ and is based in the aggregate social spending levels. Much of the evidence gathered in this research study is consistent with the resilience thesis. The impact of reforms is by no means as drastic as posited by the champions of the efficiency thesis.