No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Social Welfare in Post-Soviet Armenia: From Socialist to Liberal and Informal?
Abstract
A drastic shift from strong social citizenship rights to a liberal, privatized, informal welfare model took place in post-Soviet Armenia. Drawing on the Armenian National Statistical Service's 2005 Integrated Living Conditions Survey and research conducted by the Armenian government and international agencies, this article evaluates the system of social welfare in post-Soviet Armenia. It identifies the direction of social policy reform during the transition, considering welfare institutions, levels of social provision, and outcomes. The roles of the labor market, the state, and the informal sector in delivering social welfare are discussed. The Armenian welfare system is classified in terms of current conceptual frameworks for welfare systems.
... From the beginning of transition and the rollback of welfare regimes in the post-socialist countries, the main question welfare scholars had been asking was 'in what direction are the post-socialist welfare states developing?' Thus, much of the research on post-socialist welfare state in 1990s and early 2000s focused on the classification of welfare state regimes in Central Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union: on whether they are converging with welfare state regimes of Western Europe and on the extent to which these regimes continue to be influenced by socialist legacies (Aidukaite, 2006;Deacon, 2000;Fenger, 2007;Toots & Backmann, 2010;Wagener, 2002). It was generally accepted that the welfare state in post-socialist countries can be characterized by the residualization of welfare states and the individualization of social risks following the adoption of neoliberal policies (Babajanian, 2008;Ferge, 1997;Polese et al., 2014). At the beginning of the transition in the early 1990s, all of the states in the region started out with comparatively generous welfare state provisions, which had been consequently reduced and contracted, resulting in most cases in inadequate welfare coverage. ...
... Most of the countries of this region, including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan, were considered 'laggards' in terms of social policy reform (Deacon, 2000), and rarely merited individual focus. However, the few available studies on the Caucasus and Central Asia suggest that the concepts of welfare state and welfare regime are not easily applicable to these countries (Babajanian, 2008;Collier & Way, 2004;Gugushvili, 2010;Habibov & Fan, 2007;Urinboyev, 2011). The welfare mix in these countries includes components that are rarely taken into account by the welfare state regime approach, such as family support, mutual aid networks, remittances of labor migrants, international aid, or local self-governance institutions such as Uzbek mahalla (Babajanian, 2008;Gugushvili, 2010;Urinboyev, 2011). ...
... However, the few available studies on the Caucasus and Central Asia suggest that the concepts of welfare state and welfare regime are not easily applicable to these countries (Babajanian, 2008;Collier & Way, 2004;Gugushvili, 2010;Habibov & Fan, 2007;Urinboyev, 2011). The welfare mix in these countries includes components that are rarely taken into account by the welfare state regime approach, such as family support, mutual aid networks, remittances of labor migrants, international aid, or local self-governance institutions such as Uzbek mahalla (Babajanian, 2008;Gugushvili, 2010;Urinboyev, 2011). Many of these elements are either informal (mutual support networks, remittances) or located at the border of the formal and the informal (mahalla system in Uzbekistan). ...
This article discusses the use of informal practices in negotiating welfare with state institutions in Azerbaijan. One of the effects of transition to market economies in the post-socialist countries has been the partial withdrawal of the state from welfare provision and residualization of welfare. Recent research has shown that informal practices play an important role in “structuring welfare from below” (Morris & Polese, 2014b) across post-socialist realm. Based on in-depth interviews with engineers at different periods of their careers, namely mid-career, working pensioners, and engineering students, this article demonstrates how formal and informal institutions and practices are strategically used by individuals, families, and low level bureaucrats to achieve desired career and welfare goals. Rather than compensating for the deficiencies of formal rules and institutions, formal and informal are intertwined and merged and are actively employed both by the citizens and state institutions.
... In contrast to the friendship-centred informal networking of Russia and other Eastern parts of the former Soviet Union, most of informal networks of the contemporary Caucasus are kinship-based. Connections to the immediate family and kinship circles have been described by many researchers Babajanian, 2008;Hasanov, 2009;Sokirianskaia, 2005;Valiyev, 2011) as of particular importance for the daily lives 5 Anonymous, interview, Baku, September 2013. of the Caucasus's residents in most areas of the region. In both clan-centred societies of the North Caucasus's highlands and kinship or ethnicity-based social structures of South Caucasus, reliance on family circles, reinforced by decades of communist persecution, provided the population with coping mechanisms and social safety nets throughout the Soviet and post-communist periods Bobrovnikov, 2006a;Platz, 1995). . ...
... were widespread in the Soviet Caucasus (Feldbrugge, 1984: 541;Greenslade, 1980;O'Hearn, 1980: 225-26;Ofer, 1980: 65-66;Sampson, 1987: 126-27), a growing body of literature has also demonstrated that informal groups of present-day Caucasus are omnipresent and that their functions and organization are very similar to the communistage networks Babajanian, 2008;Sokirianskaia, 2005). One question that needs to be answered, however, is whether present-day informal networks are affected by the former regime's legacy or are they a post-communist phenomenon. ...
... The fourth group refers to former socialist countries or the former Soviet Union, e.g., Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Their welfare systems are characterized by the fact that an ideological transition from a communist model with universal social insurance and public services to a privatized model is not complete (Babajanian, 2008), giving room for the informal sector to compensate for the malfunctioning of state actors. ...
This study investigates the complex relationship between parenthood and life satisfaction using integrated (individual-level) data from the European Value Surveys (EVS) and the World Value Surveys (WVS), covering respondents from 102 countries from 1989 to 2020. It hypothesizes that welfare regimes influence the relationship, categorizing countries into eight welfare regimes, including social democratic, conservative, liberal, former socialist, productivist, liberal-informal, Middle East and North Africa, and insecure welfare regimes. Results suggest that, overall, parenthood is positively associated with life satisfaction. The positive relationship is more evident in countries with social democratic, productivist, and insecure welfare regimes than the others. Age and gender sub-sample analyses reveal that the association between parenthood and life satisfaction among women is more sensitive to welfare regimes than men. This study is the first to use the above welfare-regime categorization. It demonstrates that welfare policies are essential to life satisfaction and argues that they should be tailored to specific area-based needs of the target population.
... While the social model is not without its critics (Owens 2015), it does constitute a valuable conceptualisation, not least because it continues to inform the United Nations' human rights approach 2 and is endorsed by disabled people's movements around the globe (Tsai et al. 2010;Fontes 2014;You & Hwang 2018). The difference between the medical and social models has major implications for the nature of contemporary welfare provision and whether social policy in the post-Soviet space promotes medical model dependency or social model empowerment and independent living (Babajanian 2008;Becker & Merkuryeva 2012). ...
In response to international concerns about ongoing rights violations, this study presents a comparative analysis of
state and civil society organisations’ discourse on the early phase implementation of the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (PWD) in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The findings show that PWD continue to experience rights-denial and barriers to shaping policy and accessing
social welfare. There is a ‘disconnect’ between state and civil spheres that hampers effective implementation
and explains the endurance of the medical model of disability across the post-Soviet space.
... The next step involved a back and forth examination of each output as single case studies (e.g. Babajanian, 2008;Kim, 2008;Sumarto, 2017, Ehmke, 2019 and theoretically focused outputs that did not engage with classification debates (e.g. Plagerson and Patel, 2019) were omitted. ...
This review article revisits the influential work of Gough (2004a, 2004b) on global welfare regimes fifteen years later. The article attempts to explore how far this literature has managed to pave a bridge between comparative social policy and development studies and explores the key contributions it offered in explaining welfare regime classification in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The article then reviews selected publications that have incorporated or applied Gough’s approach and in particular reviews how far scholars developed, complemented and questioned Gough’s approach. The review focuses on the causal properties for capturing the diversity of welfare regime classifications, empirical data, methodologies applied to classify welfare regimes, cases selected, groupings identified and finally how transitions to different welfare regime memberships are explained. In the conclusion, the article discusses findings and implications for global welfare regime classification debates.
... At the same time, his charity also contrasted with state provisions in certain ways. Thus, given the drastic decrease of state welfare in the post-Soviet period (Babajanian 2008a), citizens widely associated state support with lack of resources, narrow eligibility criteria, exclusion of the needy, corruption and bureaucratic hassle, even if state provisions were some poor families' main source of income and in rare cases were quite substantial (Baghdasaryan 2014(Baghdasaryan , 2011 In contrast to this, as the above cases illustrate, Aramian's provisions had the appearance of abundance, lavishness or even luxury, of which people could sometimes partake. In spite of some encounters with rude intermediaries, many informants associated these provisions with ease and good organization, inclusive, and also vague and particularistic eligibility criteria (giving preference to oligarch's compatriots), informality, and strong control of intermediaries who distributed resources without withholding them. ...
This article investigates how patron–client relations impact the practice of citizens’ political rights, including the rights of free and voluntary suffrage and party membership, in Armenia. It presents a case study of a pervasive clientelist network reaching from a powerful patron, the founder of a political party, to intermediaries in positions of authority, and large numbers of citizens. It illustrates how politicians use the informal power of directors/managers of private and state organizations and bureaucrats over citizens’ social security in order to maintain power. Referring to the debate on coexistence or contradictions between political citizenship and clientelism, the article highlights the importance of clarifying if the notion of political citizenship is used in normative or in descriptive terms. It argues that in descriptive terms patron–client relations strongly impact the practice of citizens’ political rights in Armenia. Furthermore, in normative terms, in this case study clientelist relations involved various illicit activities and violations of citizens’ political rights.
... Armenia and Georgia have experienced the highest increase of inequality levels since the 1990s (Mkrtchyan, 2006, World Bank, 2009), which should be reflected in socio-economic positioning in society as the central cleavage in welfare preferences. In addition to the job-less growth and structural problems in economy, this tendency is also related to the minimalist and informal welfare programmes continuously implemented by their governments (Babajanian, 2008, Posarac et al., 2008. For demographic dimension of welfare preferences, the high old-age dependency ratios 8 in Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus (World Bank, 2009) might indicate on a potential conflict of interests between generations. ...
... The processes described by Babajanian (2008) for social welfare in general also apply to housing provision. Despite the fact that by definition all citizens and refugees without permanent housing are eligible, the criterion for inclusion in the current programme is extreme need, and for the moment, the provision is only intended for a small number of needy recipients. ...
Using the example of the right to housing, this article addresses the ways in which the practice of social citizenship, including popular claims and expectations and actual state provisions, has changed in post-Soviet Armenia. It examines the claims of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan to state-provided permanent housing, which they consider the key condition for becoming ‘citizens’ and ‘locals’ in Armenia, and the Armenian state's solutions to the housing issue following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It demonstrates how the Soviet-era housing policy has left its mark on current notions and practices of social citizenship in Armenia. Even though social rights in general have decreased, notions of social citizenship are still present not only in the expectations and claims of needy refugees and citizens without housing but also in the state's acknowledgement of responsibility for its citizens' welfare (though currently providing only for those in extreme need), and in the equalising effect, the state housing programme has had for the majority of refugees who participated in it.
This paper presents a model of institutional political trust in Armenia after a coup attempt. The model of political trust was created using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Results indicated strong support for a three-factor model with civil society, elected government and non-elected government as factors.
This essay presents research results from a Max Planck Research Group project in which six researchers examined the three components of Marshall's concept of citizenship in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. The essay compares these components with other approaches to citizenship, arguing that processes such as migration, the stricter enforcement of borders and the introduction of new global players and markets to the region allow citizenship concepts to be played against one another.
Introduction In this chapter I use the in/security model developed in chapter 3 to analyse insecurity and welfare on the continent of Africa. The in/security model has five main components: the structural relationships and dynamics involved in the generation of insecurity; mobilisation outcomes; rectification mix; in/security outcomes; and stratification outcomes. It can be used to analyse regimes in long-term equilibrium, regimes in short-term equilibrium (‘regime episodes’, which can often only be identified retrospectively) and regimes in transition (often involved in ‘contentious episodes’ (McAdam et al. 2001)). As discussed in chapter 3, the model potentially allows for five ‘spaces of comparison’ across the five components, and a thorough analysis would make the comparison across all five spaces. However, in a chapter of this size it is not possible to do such an analysis covering all fifty-three African countries involved in processes of post-colonial transition. Furthermore, given the problems with data on welfare mix and welfare outcomes (which are discussed below), quantitative comparisons across these two spaces, of the kind made in the Latin America and East Asia chapters, would be difficult. In any case, I would argue that, in current African conditions, comparisons across the other three spaces lead to more interesting and policy-relevant conclusions. As a result the structure of this chapter differs from that of chapters 4 and 5. Tilly has suggested that understanding of ‘big structures’ and ‘large processes’ can be generated by a number of different approaches to comparison. © Ian Gough, Geof Wood, Armando Barrientos, Philippa Bevan, Peter Davis and Graham Room 2004.
The EU started relatively late to inject social considerations into the enlargement process. A vision connected to the European Social Model could have been instrumental in handling the social problems emerging after the transition but did not play a basic role in shaping Hungarian social policy. Many factors and actors impacted on the changes that took place in social policy procedures and institutions. For instance, the ILO and the EU influenced labour market issues, while family policy was mostly shaped by home-bred ideologies, and to some extent the World Bank. Pension reform was fully steered by the World Bank. The EU had an important role in shaping social and civil dialogue. As the monitoring reports following the progress of the candidate countries show, the concerns of the EU remained economic and political. The reports approved the moves towards the neo-liberal model inspired by the monetarist agencies. This paper argues that the European impact in the social sphere has strengthened over recent years, and its main payoff is the growing interest and commitment of politics towards poverty and inclusion, and the widening practice of civil and social dialogue.
This paper assesses the place of EU accession among the determinants of the changes taking place in the Czech social policy after 1989. Compulsory social and health insurance were re-introduced in the early 1990s, along with a guaranteed subsistence minimum for all, and an institutionalized state employment policy. This paper argues that EU-derived policies have had only a limited impact on Czech social-policy reform, focusing mostly on institution building. This phenomenon can be attributed to the apparent discrepancy between Copenhagen criteria of accession (1993) and the Lisbon Strategy, which was accepted as a policy guideline in 2002. Thus, the main concept able to explain Czech social-policy development after 1989 is that of institutional and behavioural path dependency as the country exhibited resistance to change coupled with a strong adherence to the Bismarckian, corporatist, welfare state. This makes the Czech Republic a special case compared to the other Visegrad countries, where the pressure from neo-liberal public-policy concepts of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund found its expression in the introduction of more residual social policies.
This paper surveys the debate regarding Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states and reviews the modified or alternative typologies ensuing from this debate. We confine ourselves to the classifications which have been developed by Esping-Andersen's critics in order to cope with the following alleged shortcomings of his typology: (1) the misspecification of the Mediterranean welfare states as immature Continental ones; (2) the labelling of the Antipodean welfare states as belonging to the `liberal' regime type; (3) a neglect of the gender-dimension in social policy. We reconstruct several typologies of welfare states in order to establish, first, whether real welfare states are quite similar to others or whether they are rather unique specimens, and, second, whether there are three ideal-typical worlds of welfare capitalism or more. We conclude that real welfare states are hardly ever pure types and are usually hybrid cases; and that the issue of ideal-typical welfare states cannot be satisfactorily answered given the lack of formal theorizing and the still inconclusive outcomes of comparative research. In spite of this conclusion there is plenty of reason to continue to work on and with the original or modified typologies.
This article is divided into four parts. First there is a summary of the social policy of the old state-socialist regimes, some description of the legacy of social problems which they bequeathed to those making the transition to capitalism and a brief summary of the major social costs of the early years of the transition process. Second, the broad social-policy strategies of the new governments of Eastern Europe and the former USSR are reviewed as they have attempted to manage both the legacy of social problems from the past and the new social costs of transition. Third, in more detail developments in five specific fields are described: levels of public expenditure on social welfare; income maintenance policy; health and medical care; housing; and education. The article concludes by attempting to explain these changes, asking whether the policy changes have been motivated by a perceived need to reduce social provision, with a view to becoming more competitive within the global economy.
Two researchers examine several crucial features of the transformation of Soviet welfare provision in post-Soviet Georgia. Institutional analysis and household surveys in two industrial cities in Georgia are used to identify determinants of distribution and access to three sectors of social welfare: water, heat, and education. The data are used to develop a multidimensional conceptional framework for change.
The EU started relatively late to inject social considerations into the enlargement process. A vision connected to the European Social Model could have been instrumental in handling the social problems emerging after the transition but did not play a basic role in shaping Hungarian social policy. Many factors and actors impacted on the changes that took place in social policy procedures and institutions. For instance, the ILO and the EU influenced labour market issues, while family policy was mostly shaped by home-bred ideologies, and to some extent the World Bank. Pension reform was fully steered by the World Bank. The EU had an important role in shaping social and civil dialogue. As the monitoring reports following the progress of the candidate countries show, the concerns of the EU remained economic and political. The reports approved the moves towards the neo-liberal model inspired by the monetarist agencies. This paper argues that the European impact in the social sphere has strengthened over recent years, and its main payoff is the growing interest and commitment of politics towards poverty and inclusion, and the widening practice of civil and social dialogue.
Informal payments in the health sector in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are emerging as a fundamental aspect of health care financing and a serious impediment to health care reform. Informal payments are payments to individuals or institutions in cash or in kind made outside official payment channels for services that are meant to be covered by the public health care system. Such private payments to public personnel have created an informal market for health care within the confines of the public health care service network, and are a form of corruption. Unlike gratuity payments to providers, informal payments are required, not discretionary. Part of the problem can be traced to declining revenues without commensurate downsizing of buildings, hospital beds and health personnel, which has meant reductions in salaries and in some countries chronic arrears. Informal payments compensate for lost earnings. Reforms to modernize the Region’s health systems must compete with the personal revenues from informal payments, making change difficult. The frequency of informal payments exceeds 60 percent in the CIS countries for which there are data, reaching 91 percent in Armenia, and are reported in all but a handful of Eastern European countries. Inpatient care carries the highest costs, but pharmaceuticals are the most frequently purchased health service that public providers do not finance. Informal payments have become a major impediment to health care access leading to both reduced consumption due to unaffordable cost and the selling of personal assets to finance care. Systematic reports of delayed care in Poland, 37 percent reduction in prenatal care in Tajikistan and the fact that 45 percent of rural patients sold assets to finance health care in the Kyrgyz Republic suggest rising inaccessibility and declines in equity. Options for addressing the problem include comprehensive anti-corruption policies, downsizing of the public system, paring back the set of services subsidized by government, encouraging cost sharing for those who can afford it, improving accountability, and promoting private alternatives.
This paper reviews the main lessons from existing social protection programmes in low-income countries for the development of social protection in these countries. It is taken for granted that introducing social protection in low income countries is that much harder due to constraints arising from underdevelopment, fragmented political and policy processes, reduced tax base, and weak administrative capacity. The paper examines existing social protection programmes in order to illuminate on the strength of these constraints, and the nature of potential remedies. The paper concludes that the experience of low-income countries shows there are many policy options available to them. It also concludes that while deficits in finance and operational capacity are much less tractable, global partnerships can work effectively to lift these constraints.
The paper describes the issue of the impact of poverty and income inequality on the health of the population using Armenia as a case study. In the framework of this paper author provides an overview of research relating to inequalities in health to the disadvantage of the poor, and to changes in impoverishment and income inequality associated with payments for health care. After demonstrating the logic of the investigation, the paper recapitulates the information about results of reforms that do not appear to meet all the objectives of health care policy. The paper indicates that the gains in freedom have been accompanied by the losses of many basic economic and social services that the population had come to enjoy and expect. At the same time the success of reforms applied in Armenia is often evaluated against improvements in the health status of the population. Funding shortages often means that even vulnerable groups have to pay. Thus, the principle of equity with respect to financing and access is undermined. It is emphasized that reducing poverty and income inequality should be grounded in a pro-poor growth approach, i.e. for equality to be achieved economic growth in the development process should be deliberately adapted to the needs of the poor. The paper concludes that there is undoubtedly a large gap in our knowledge on how best to reach the poor in the health sector. In order to fill this gap, more work is needed along the lines of the above studies related to health sector inequalities and public policy. There is necessity to encourage the development of insurance companies, pension funds, and funds for public health care education, which have not yet been properly undertaken.
This article analyzes the extent to which the Basic Benefit Package (BBP), a subsidized health program in Armenia, increases utilization and affordability of outpatient health care among the poor. We find that beneficiaries of the BBP pay approximately 45 % less in fees for doctor visits (and display 36 % higher outpatient utilization rates) than eligible users not receiving the BBP. However, even among BBP beneficiaries the level of outpatient health care utilization remains low. This occurs because the program mainly provides discounted fees for doctor visits, but fees do not constitute the main financial constraint for users. Our estimates suggest that other non-fee expenditures, such as prescription medicines, constitute a more significant financial constraint and are not subsidized by the BBP. As a result, outpatient health care remains expensive even for BBP beneficiaries.
This article is divided into four parts. First there is a summary of the social policy of the old state-socialist regimes, some description of the legacy of social problems which they bequeathed to those making the transition to capitalism and a brief summary of the major social costs of the early years of the transition process. Second, the broad social-policy strategies of the new governments of Eastern Europe and the former USSR are reviewed as they have attempted to manage both the legacy of social problems from the past and the new social costs of transition. Third, in more detail developments in five specific fields are described: levels of public expenditure on social welfare; income maintenance policy; health and medical care; housing; and education. The article concludes by attempting to explain these changes, asking whether the policy changes have been motivated by a perceived need to reduce social provision, with a view to becoming more competitive within the global economy.
How are the distinctive gender regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union changing? What is the impact of the transition - and especially of the loss of state expenditure and state legitimacy - on women as paid workers, partners/wives, mothers, carers and citizens? Have women become more familialized as a result of transition processes? The Monee statistical database of 27 countries, and policy questionnaires to 12, show growing social, economic and cultural diversity. But the soviet legacy and the transition processes give these countries common ground too. Equal rights at work and womenÕs need for paid employment remain from the soviet era. But the gap between rights and practice widens. Legal equality in marriage remains, but domestic violence and the domestic division of labour give evidence of unequal relationships. While the soviet state socialized many costs of motherhood and care work, in some countries families are now bearing much heavier costs. Women as citizens now have more freedoms to organize, but action is more focused on coping and survival than on wider politics: women are - broadly - more familialized, more dependent on family relationships if perhaps less dependent in them.
The history of social policy during the last hundred years would be seriously incomplete without giving a full account of the dramatic influence of John Maynard Keynes. He was instrumental in helping Europe recover from the Second World War of 1939–45 — in contrast to the failures after the First — and in establishing the Bretton Woods institutions and the welfare state. Social development lay at the heart of his concern — in the construction of practical policies as much as in his astute handling of economic theory. He cut the ground from beneath the feet of classical and neo-classical economic theorists, and the policies he recommended were found to work in practice. Certainly the early postwar years represent an acknowledged watershed in world history. If not exactly a thing of the past mass unemployment was no longer an immediate threat. Recovery and economic progress were real. Inequality had been reduced. Colonial powers were in retreat.
Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.
Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy--defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare--operates in the poorer regions of the world. Making an important contribution by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America, it develops a new conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regimes in a range of countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa. © Ian Gough, Geof Wood, Armando Barrientos, Philippa Bevan, Peter Davis and Graham Room 2004.
List of cartoons List of figures and tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Blat: the unknown phenomenon 2. Understanding blat 3. The Soviet order: a view from within 4. The use of personal networks 5.Blat as a form of exchange: between gift and commodity 6. Networking in the post-Soviet period Appendix Bibliography Index.
Benedict Anderson identifies a common post-war pattern of development in the 'long strip of coastal capitalist states stretching down from South Korea to the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean' (Anderson 1998: 300). This will serve to delimit East Asia for the purposes of this chapter. The definition notably excludes the two regional powers, Japan and China, alongside North Korea. It embraces ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but leaves Myanmar in a limbo, and extends northwards to include Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The major countries are shown in Table 1, in order of economic affluence. All the countries, except Thailand, have been colonised up to and including the twentieth century but by a variety of different powers: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain, the US and Japan. The region also encompasses vast differences from rich Singapore to very poor Laos and Cambodia, country variations wider than those in any other part of the world. To make our task manageable, this chapter will ignore the richest - the city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong - and the poorest, newly emerging economies of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The remaining group are all classified by the World Bank as 'middle income', though Indonesia hovers on the borderline of low income countries.
Post-communist welfare regimes are frequently portrayed as a hybrid consisting of the relics of communist social policy and a neophyte imitation of the US model of welfare. Both components of that hybrid are regarded as incompatible with the 'European social model'. At the same time, most welfare reformers in East-Central Europe try to avoid falling into the trap of first, conserving the statist, inefficient and pseudo-egalitarian character of the old system of social policy; second, seeking new forms of welfare collectivism along the national-conservative/populist 'third roads' between capitalism and communism; third, triggering popular discontent by dismantling the old welfare regimes too rapidly, or in a haphazard way; and fourth, targeting an end-state which has become unsustainable in the Western world during the past two decades. Meanwhile, the emerging welfare regimes in the region are far from being identical and the reformers do not find stable institutional arrangements in the West to copy. In an effort to make sense of this complex picture, the paper examines what has 'really' happened in the welfare sectors in the region during the past decade by presenting three dominant narratives of the social transformation: 'leaping in the dark', 'marking time' and 'muddling through'.
The problems connected with the presence of international migrants in the Russian labour market are analysed in this article. The study reveals the role of foreign citizens in the labour market structure of the capital of Russia - Moscow - and the effect of the presence of migrants on the employment of Muscovites. The particular character of the main flows of migrants is described and its effect on different spheres of the Moscow population’s activities is determined. The study also looks at migrants’ social protection. Muscovites’ relations to international migrants of different social groups, and the causes of these relations, are defined. Finally, the article looks at possible measures regulating the flows of labour migrants.
Welfare state reform in East-Central Europe can be divided into two phases: in the first phase, when liberalisation, stabilisation and privatisation were of primary importance, only minor or absolutely necessary reform steps were taken. This soon led many countries into fiscal problems that triggered the second phase of substantial pension and health system reforms. Having been already part of the European welfare state tradition in the pre-communist period, the countries of East-Central Europe were not prepared to take over the essentially private three pillar model of the World Bank. Instead the forerunners of reform, such as Hungary, Poland and Latvia, are developing, together with some incumbent EU members, a new European four pillar model with a specific public-private mix. Even if the social acquis communautaire is not very restrictive for the candidate states, they seem keen to join the European welfare state culture.
In 2004 eight Central and East European countries are joining the EU. This article explores the changes that have overtaken those countries since the 1989 transition from communism. It begins with a note on the alternative sources of data that might be used, and the difficulties of arriving at a summary of the nature of social policy development and the social conditions that have evolved in the countries. It then presents an analysis of the broad changes across the whole region, now comprising 27 countries, the common phases of change they have shared, and the way that they have diversified into some countries that are already close to the circumstances of existing EU members and some which are in a desperately disintegrated state. The main part of the article presents data on public expenditure, social policies, and social conditions that can be found in the eight new members, and discerns the common and divergent patterns of change that can be found. In the conclusion, issues of path dependency, diversity, and Europeanization are considered. The prospects for the eight new EU members are summarized, and a judgement is made that there are grounds for optimism in their future capacity to sustain social solidarity through social protection and support.
This article argues that the social capital framework used by development agencies in community-driven development projects in post-Soviet countries may not be adequate for analysing conditions affecting community participation. Research in Armenia shows that the availability of social capital in a community may not necessarily translate into participation. The governance environment plays a key role in affecting the nature and forms of community participation and in shaping local institutions in Armenia. The research argues against the ‘cultural’ view of institutional change, which presumes that the main barriers to participation are posed by cultural factors, such as interpersonal trust and the ‘mentality’ of post-Soviet citizens. Development interventions that focus on building social capital as a means to promote community participation may not be effective without addressing broader structural factors affecting participation.
The first part of this paper offers a cumulative review of the changes in global objectives and operating principles and their global consequences, characteristic of the shift from the ideal type of the modern welfare state to the neo-liberal or post-modern paradigm. The paper then spells out some of the implications of this shift for social security in the “transition countries” of Central and Eastern Europe. The tendencies (from marketization to the spread of means-testing) are similar to those in the West; but they are much more marked and there is much less political and popular resistance to these changes. One of the crucial ingredients of the shift is the undermining of the age-old solidarity between generations, a trend also strongly recommended by the supranational agencies. The “catch”, or the “paradox of democracy” is that, for all the lack of resistance, people do not seem to approve of the rapid withdrawal of the state and the loss of their existential securities.
Studies of the informal economy in the Third World have evolved toward defining the informal sector in relationship to the state. This article analyzes some activities that escape the control of the state, with special attention to centrally planned economies. Informal exchanges include bureaucratic favors (“connections”), clientelism, different forms of corruption, and the “parallel” system of production and marketing. I show that economic laws are not sufficient to understand the logic of these economies.
This paper examines the impact of a decade of transition on living standards and welfare in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Following independence in 1991 all countries suffered a sharp decline in GDP per capita, with levels in some countries falling to below a quarter of the pre-transition level. Since then, all countries have experienced positive economic growth. The key questions are whether this growth has been accompanied by declines in inequality and poverty and, if so, how sustainable are these improvements. There is some evidence that recent growth has benefited the poor. However, at the start of the new century, an estimated 39 million people in Central Asia and the Caucasus were living in poverty, of whom over 14 million were living in extreme poverty. Moreover, there is evidence of growing inequalities in terms of access to health and education services, with implications for future human development. Continuing poor governance within the region represents a major barrier to future poverty reduction.
This paper compares the system of social maintenance and insurance in the Soviet Union, which was in force in the three Baltic countries before their independence, with the currently existing social security systems. The aim of the paper is to highlight the forces that have influenced social policy transformation from its former highly universal, however authoritarian form, to the less universal, social insurance-based systems of present day Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
It will be demonstrated that the welfare–economy nexus is not the only important factor in the development of social programs. Rather, social policy should be studied as if embedded in the political, historical and cultural aspects of a given society. The people’s attitude towards distributive justice will be highlighted as being one of the most important factors for either social policy shortcomings or expansion.
This paper takes steps to combine quantitative and qualitative data.
Beginning from the framework of welfare state regimes in rich capitalist countries, this article radically redefines it and applies the new model to regions and countries which experience problematic states as well as imperfect markets. A broader, comparative typology of regimes (welfare state, informal security, insecurity) is proposed, which captures the essential relationships between social and cultural conditions, institutional performance, welfare outcomes, and path dependence. Using this model, different regions of the world (East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa) are compared. For many poorer, partially capitalized societies, people’s security relies informally upon various clientelist relationships. Formalizing rights to security via strategies for de-clientelization becomes a stepping stone to protecting people against the insecurity of markets.
Many researchers and commentators underestimate the length and importance of the time lags between initial research investment and ultimate impacts on the development and adoption of technological innovations. In both econometric studies of productivity and ex post and ex ante benefit-cost evaluations of research investments, researchers typically impose untested assumptions about the R&D lag, which can have profound implications for the results. In this paper we present a range of evidence on agricultural R&D lags including both aggregative analysis of U.S. agricultural productivity using time series data, and some specific details on the timelines for the research, development, and adoption processes for particular mechanical and biological innovations in U.S. agriculture. The aggregative analysis makes use of a comparatively rich state-level data set on U.S. agriculture that makes it possible to test hypotheses about the R&D lag and to evaluate the implications for the specification of models of production and for findings regarding the rate of return to public research investments. The results support the use of a longer lag with a different shape than is typically imposed in studies of industrial R&D. These findings are supported by the timelines for specific technological innovations, including new crop varieties, as well as tractors and other mechanical innovations.
In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition has increasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media. The term 'informal sector' has been used to describe an extremely wide spectrum of activities, which do not necessarily have much in common, such as tax evasion, corruption, money laundering, organised crime, bribery, subsistence farming, barter, petty trade, and the stealing of state property. This is problematic for the design of public policy as these activities may raise very different (and conflicting) policy issues. This paper provides a framework with which to analyse these different types of 'hidden' activities in order to design appropriate social, labour market, fiscal, and other policies. We build on the concepts and definitions of the System of National Accounts (1993), to develop a new conceptual framework that distinguishes between four types of 'hidden' activities: informal activities, which are undertaken 'to meet basic needs';underground activities, which are deliberately concealed from public authorities; illegal activities, which generate goods and services forbidden by the law; and household activities, which produce goods and services for own-consumption. We provide an example of how this concept of informal activities can be operationalised to analyse informal employment, and apply it to the Georgia Labour Force Survey (1999) data. Preliminary results reveal that more than half of Georgia's employed population works informally.
Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
- Goa
Citizenship and the Boundaries of the Acknowledged Community: Identity, Affiliation and Exclusion
- Naila Kabeer
The State and Social Welfare: The Objectives of Policy
- Alastair Mcauley
Utilities' Pricing and the Poor: The Case of Armenia
- Frederick Nixson
- Bernard Walters
Armenia Contextual Analysis
- Oxfam
Corruption in the seven low-income countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States
- Jean-Jacques Dethier
Republic of Armenia: Country Report on Population, Poverty and Development
- Goa
Comparative Social Policy: Theory and Research
- Patricia Kennett
Armenia Fears Population Crisis
- Naira Melkumian
Report No. 15693-AM, Municipal and Social Services Division, Europe and Central Asia Region
- World Bank