Anton Hemerijck and Manos Matsaganis present their most recent book 'Who’s Afraid of the Welfare State Now?'.
Who’s Afraid of the Welfare State Now? explores the welfare-policy responses to the Great Recession, reform trajectories that swept across Europe over the last decade, with a final chapter that focuses on Covid-19 welfare management. The 2008 crash marked a critical stress test for European welfare states with dramatic repercussions, including a massive surge in unemployment, a widening in wage and income disparities, and rising poverty. Hikes in fiscal deficits and public debt, required to pre-empt an economic meltdown, forced policymakers to make painful cuts in welfare services to shore up public finances, thereby jeopardizing welfare support for vulnerable groups. The overall scope of welfare-policy responses is heterogeneous, disparate, and uneven. In some cases, the response to the Great Recession was accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in others unpopular crisis-management measures received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions, and employer organizations. Alongside serious retrenchments, there have been assertive attempts to rebuild social programmes and institutions, to accommodate policy repertoires-not merely domestically but also at the EU level-to the new realities of the knowledge economy and an ageing society. Overall, the long 2010s showed that the future of work and welfare is in our hands: it is perfectly possible to shape this future in such a way as to provide inclusive social security, achieve high employment, advance and maintain human capabilities across the life-course, and fight poverty and inequality.
AGENDA
16:00 – 16:30 | Welcome, Introduction by the Chair & Moderator, Waltraud Schelkle, EUI and the Authors Anton Hemerijck, EUI and Manos Matsaganis, Polytechnic University of Milan
16:30-17:00 | First Roundtable
Peter Hall, Harvard University
Isabel Perera, EUI Max Weber Fellow
Camille Portier, EUI Max Weber Fellow
17:00-17:30 | Coffee break
17:30 – 18:15 | Second Roundtable
Monika Queisser, OECD
Tomasso Nannincini, EUI STG
Response by the authors
Q&A session
18:15 | Cocktail for registered participants
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