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Revisiting the trilemma of modern welfare states‒Application of the fuzzy-set ideal type analysis‒

Shin Dong-Myeon 1 Young Jun Choi 2

1경희대학교
2고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore whether the trilemma of welfare states has been a valid argument about the recent change of welfare states. Based on fuzzy-set ideal type analysis of data from seventeen OECD countries, it examines that welfare states have achieved three core policy objectives -income equality, employment growth and fiscal discipline- in the service economy during the period between 1981 and 2010. The evidence presented in this paper does not support the trilemma of the service economy where only two goals can be pursued successfully at one time, at a cost of the other remained goal. The trilemma has been effective only to the countries in liberal welfare regime where employment growth and fiscal discipline has been achieved at a cost of higher levels of income equality. However, conservative welfare-state regimes have experienced the deterioration of income equality and fiscal restraint after the mid 1980s and it seems that they have diverged into various models. In the countries of the social democratic welfare regime, the goals of equality and employment have been achieved simultaneously together with fiscal discipline since the early 2000s. While they are classified as the perfect model in the research, Southern European welfare states including Greece and Italy, classified as ‘the crisis model’, have not performed well in all the three aspects. On the evidence presented in this paper, it can be said that the trilemma of welfare states in the service economy is not effective to explain the policy goals of welfare state as well as the result of redistributive politics in the service economy.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.