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Introduction
Einar Overbye works at the Department of Social Work, Child Welfare and Social Policy, Oslo Metropolitan University. His main research area is Social Policy and Health Policy.
His main applied interest is comparative studies of policy implementation, while his main theoretical interest concerns the intersection between principal-agent theory and semiotics.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2006 - present
Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- Studying and teaching national, as well as international, Social welfare and health policy.
Publications
Publications (74)
The paper discusses how citizens can be granted strong access rights to welfare, while at the same time maintaining flexibility in how access criteria are interpreted and carried out. To which extent, and how, can legal rights and flexible access rules be combined?
This volume is a comprehensive reference for conducting political analyses of emerging welfare systems in the Global South. These countries have adopted a development-oriented approach, one distinct from the social policy trajectory observed in industrialized capitalist states. However, the pervasive influence of globalization since the 1990s has s...
Depending on how one counts, there are between 193 and 205 states or self-governing territories in the world. None of them have exactly the same political configurations, or exactly the same welfare policies, or display exactly the same welfare outcomes. If this was all that is at stake, the answer would have to be that countries have been and like...
The ongoing social investment turn that can presently be observed in European welfare systems may be regarded as a welfare-state version of the so-called “Asian model of development” that was popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the Asian crisis in 1997-98. The basic characteristic of the Asian model was an active state, providing the neces...
To study discrimination in labour/housing markets, and among street-level bureaucrats in the welfare state, present both theoretical and methodological challenges. In the sociological study of discrimination, experiments have seldom been used to study how street-level bureaucrats make their decisions. The context of decision-making is different in...
Profesjonsutøvere står daglig i situasjoner der de må ta vanskelige avgjørelser, basert på faglig skjønn. Å bruke faglig skjønn vil si ta handlingsvalg i situasjoner der det ikke er opplagt hva man bør gjøre. Valgene må begrunnes ut fra et sikrest mulig kunnskapsgrunnlag. Det er ikke tilstrekkelig å begrunne et faglig handlingsvalg med en appell ti...
Fri innvandring hadde teknisk sett vært en enkel måte å regulere adgangen til Norge på. Men det er 7,9 milliarder mennesker i verden, og flyprisene er så lave at selv de cirka 700 millioner som lever for under 1,9 dollar dagen (det mest bruke målet for absolutt fattigdom), kan låne tilstrekkelig av en pengeutlåner til å betale flybilletten. Selv om...
Et land har alltid råd til det som prioriteres høyest. men hva skal prioriteres høyest?
Kapitlet beskriver velferdsstatens samlede utgifter, og diskuterer forhold som kan utgjøre politiske rammebetingelser. Det er først og fremst aldringen av befolkningen og konsekvensene av innvandring, men også økonomisk globalisering og EØS-avtalens betydning....
Using the Ghanaian LEAP benefit programme as a case study, we investigate how administrators, service personnel and beneficiaries perceive and respond to implementation dilemmas. The investigation focuses on the LEAP benefit for caregivers of children, which is conditional on children’s school attendance, health check‐ups and vaccinations. An ethic...
Has there been a tendency toward more integrated social welfare systems and broader social welfare coverage in Europe? The short answer is: yes. But it is an answer with certain caveats, and it depends on how concepts such as “integrated” “social welfare system” and, for that matter, “Europe” is defined.
In short, the thesis in this paper is that...
The state has three historic roles in pension provision: To provide public pensions for its citizens, to regulate the private pension sector (including occupational pensions), and to provide occupational pensions to its own employees (state and municipal employees). In theory these are three distinct and different roles. In practice, however, they...
Kapittel i boka "Trygd i aktiveringens tid" (red: Ann-Helen bay m.fl.) Kapitlet beskriver først europeiske trygdesystemer, og i hvilken grad Norge er en avviker. Fulgt av en redegjørelse for hvordan EU påvirker norsk trygdepolitikk. Videre følger en beskrivelse av trygdesystemene i middel- og lavinntektsland ("land i sør"), og i hvilken grad de ski...
The chapter offers a long and descriptive account of activation policy programs in the five Nordic countries anno 2003. It may form a baseline for investigating later institutional change in this policy area.
The five main sub-chapters are 1) What is activation policy, 2) Scope and structure of active measures, 3) New designs in "passive" benefits...
Hvis du vil bli udødelig,
skap noe underholdende.
Intet eldes bedre enn glede.
(Fritt etter Oscar Wilde)
”Inom socialpolitiken brukar Norge kopiera tio år gamla svenska
reformer, men till två tredjedelar av priset”. Detta konstaterande, ur
djupet av hjärtat hos en ledande ämbetsman i norska Socialdepartementet,
gäller knappast alla typer av socialpolitik. Men det
passar bra in på pensionsområdet. Det offentliga pensionssystemet
antogs 1967 och är en b...
Hvorfor blir det flere uførepensjonister?
Tretten teorier og et løsningsforslag
[Oppdatering 2019: Veksten i uførepensjonering har stagnert, antagelig mye fordi en variant av løsningsforslaget er implementert.]
Et paper om arvens økende betydniung i et moderne samfunn. Drevet av to trender: En økning i privat formue i bredere lag av folket, særlig boligformue, kombinert med stadig færre barn per familie å dele arven på.
Hovedtese: I skyggen av konflikten mellom markedstilhengere og statstilhengere, styrker igjen familien seg som fordelingsarena.
Gamle...
Humans are born and die. Compared to that, everything in-between are details.
The article accounts for the four stages in the global demographic transition, and the accompanying epidemiological transition. It further discusses to which extent the transition, and its final stage, raises new challenges for social policy and creates new problems for...
An updated going-through of Norwegian migration policy. With reference to the various social and health policy consequences og various migration rules and regulations. Distinctions are made between immigrants from the European Union, refugee migration (further differentiated into asylum seekers and quota refugees), family reunion migration, student...
Det har blitt stadig vanligere å karakterisere norske velferdsordninger som «universelle», også i autoritative politiske dokumenter. Det reiser spørsmålet om hva som karakteriserer universelle velferdsordninger, og om universalisme alltid er å foretrekke framfor selektivisme. Artikkelen drøfter disse spørsmålene gjennom en detaljert redegjørelse av...
We conducted a vignette experiment involving 470 Norwegian front-line workers to investigate whether their decisions to sanction non-compliance of activation requirements varied with the ethnicity of the welfare claimant. This is the first vignette experiment on ethnic discrimination in the administration of activation programmes in Europe. The stu...
© 2016 Author(s). This is an Open Access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0 License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and
redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon
the material for non-commercial use, provided the ori...
Norway is a small, open economy. Yet Norway avoided the 2008/9 financial crisis. The paper presents four factors that may explain why some countries escape a crisis while others do not: crude and contingent luck, and crude and contingent skill. All factors were at play when Norway escaped the crisis.
Background
Differences in mortality with regard to socioeconomic status have widened in recent decades in many European countries, including Norway. A rapid upsurge of immigration to Norway has occurred since the 1990s. The article investigates the impact of immigration on educational mortality differences among adults in Norway.
Methods
Two linke...
The paper is divided in four parts. Part 1 gives an empirical assessment of the evolution of European social welfare systems, 1883-2013. Old age pension systems are the first to be traced, since they are by far the economically most important cash benefit systems. The perspective is then broadened to other cash benefit systems (unemployment, employ...
From a diffusion-of-policy-ideas perspective, Latin American CCTs and Scandinavian activation schemes have both been quite influential, also outside their regions of origin. A joint characteristic of both types of schemes is active conditionality. That is, receipt of a benefit is conditioned on the claimant, or his/her household, doing some specifi...
Arbeidsmotivasjon brukes gjerne som et samlebegrep om individers subjektive orientering mot arbeid som livsverdi, eller om hvor viktig arbeid er for den enkelte. Beslektete begreper er arbeidsinvolvering, arbeidsbinding og arbeidsorientering. Arbeidsmotivasjon kan defineres som det sett av krefter innenfor og utenfor individet som initierer arbeids...
I dette kapitlet skal vi analysere hvordan utformingen av det samlede norske stønadssystemet kan føre til at flere blir mottakere av helserelaterte stønader enn av dagpenger eller sosialhjelp, og drøfte hvilke konsekvenser det har.
red.) 2011: Multikulturell teori og flerkulturelle praksiser. Oslo: Abstrakt forlag Innledning 1 Det bor ca 6800 millioner mennesker utenfor Norges grenser. De fleste har neppe noe ønske om å flytte hit. Landet ligger langt mot nord, og folket snakker et språk få forstår. Men Norge er blant verdens rikeste land, og får man varig oppholdstillatelse,...
This report traces the trends in decentralisation and privatisation in the Norwegian welfare state from 1980 till 2008. Two core questions: To which extent is public provision of welfare benefits and services the responsibility of the nation state, and to which extent has regional and local governments got increasing power in this policy area? Seco...
An influential hypothesis in the welfare literature states that pensions are so popular they can never be significantly cut back. Another influential hypothesis states that policy change is "path-dependent". Recent pension reforms suggest that both hypotheses are wrong. Pension reforms during the 1990s were often path-breaking rather than path-depe...
The interplay between organizational structure and political behaviour is one of the focal points of political science. How and to what extent do existing organizational structures constrain and channel future political decision-making? One specific hypothesis from the welfare literature provides the starting-point for this article: Korpi's argumen...
What are the levels of living conditions of young social assistance recipients compared to the youth population at large? This paper investigates living conditions among young social assistance recipients in Norway, compared to a similar age group within the total population. The overall distribution indicates a cumulative rather than compensatory...
I dagligtale settes det ofte likhetstegn mellom satsingen på inkluderende
arbeidsliv og intensjonsavtalen om inkluderende arbeidsliv (IA-avtalen), som
regjeringen inngikk med partene i arbeidslivet i 2001. Inkluderende arbeidsliv er
imidlertid et videre konsept. IA-avtalen er bare ett virkemiddel i en verktøykasse
av virkemidler. Det er minst fire...
I boka Solidarity in Europe analyserer Steinar Stjernø to ting: fenomenet solidaritet, og politikeres bruk av ordet solida-ritet. Jeg skal kommentere disse analy-sene med utgangspunkt i rational choice-teori; også kjent under kjaele-akronymet RAT. Som akronymet antyder er RAT-samfunnsvitere stolte, uavhengige foskere og ikke akademiske lemen. Det e...
The article discusses strategies to extend social security cover-age in developing and newly industrialised countries. The three major options are to extend social insurance coverage, to rely on mutuals or micro-insurance or to bring in social assistance in one form or another. Social insurance usually covers small population segments. Insiders are...
The Scandinavian countries are sometimes described as “institutional” welfare states, implying that there is no room for private (supplementary/voluntary) welfare provisions alongside public welfare. This is wrong, at least in the case of pensions. Private pensions are alive and well both in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. However, the scope as well as...
The state performs three pension-political roles. First, it provides public pensions. Second, it regulates the private — including the occupational — pension sector. Third, it provides occupational pensions for its own employees. The three roles as provider, regulator and employer are in principle separate from each other, but in practice tend to g...
The article provides an overview of the voluntary (private) pension sector in the Nordic countries, and relates it to the mandatory (public) pension system. It also provides an account of how the Nordic countries have tried to cope with various weaknesses of voluntary occupational plans. The problem of State involvement in the voluntary pension sec...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oslo, 1997. Includes bibliographical references (p. 355-380).
Part 1. Stability and change - structure versus agency
Part 2. Microfoundations - voters as principals, politicians as agents.
The first three articles are comparative case-studies focusing on changes in the design of pension arrangements in a limited numbe...
In the late 19th and early 20th century, indus trialized countries introduced a variety of pen sion schemes to sustain elderly people. These initial schemes may broadly be classified as 'contributory' or 'assistance-based'. However, over time, there has been a convergence to wards dual mandatory systems where the ma jority receive contribution- bas...
Scandinavia and Australia share a similar sequence of pension-political developments. Starting out from means-tested minimum pensions, these countries have moved towards a dual mandatory pension structure in which the working population has access to compulsory second-tier schemes, while marginal groups are served through income-tested minimum bene...
Explaining the existence and stability of democracies pose difficulties for the public choice paradigm. This article argues that these difficulties may be resolved by focusing on the insurance aspect of democratic decision-making procedures. Democratic regimes may be better able than autocratic regimes to provide the inhabitants with insurance agai...
The Nordic countries are often portrayed as belonging to a separate welfare regime, characterized by “institutional” welfare arrangements crowding out private welfare. However, a closer look reveals important differences in the public/private welfare mix. By focusing on pension politics in particular, the article argues that these policy difference...
Welfare expenditures are difficult to explain within a pure public-choice framework. In this article, the author argues that the difficulties may be resolved by assuming that the main purpose of welfare schemes is to provide the electorate--in their capacity of different risk categories--with insurance against various social risks, rather than to r...
The article offers a new solution to one of the major puzzles facing the public choice-paradigm: the ‘Paradox of not voting’. Utilizing a principal-agent model, I argue that voting may be regarded as a rational investment decision: not an investment in a particular electorial outcome, but in a type of reputation which the individual is interested i...
A central question in the welfare state debate has been whether or not social policies in industrialized countries converge. Originally linked to the logic of industrialism perspective, this idea has been criticized by researchers focusing on differences in timing and differences in the institutional set up of social security schemes across countri...
The pension structures of the Nordic countries are often described as statist structures. Generous public pensions are supposedly crowding out private pension alternatives (including occupational pensions). It is argued that these systems unite the pension-political interests of workers and marginal groups resulting in stable "pension regimes". Thi...
1. The mood of a nation Norwegians, or at least Norwegian politicians, take for granted that work is more satisfying than leisure. It is tempting to speculate if this is due to a remnant of Protestant work ethic in an otherwise secularised society, or the result of a hegemonic social-democratic political culture. Social democrats have traditionally...
