ABSTRACT
The development of the welfare state in Spain has attracted little attention from academics and experts in the area of social policy. Such lack of interest is most probably related to the fact that Spain was under General Franco’s rule over a period of nearly 40 years (1939-75). In their sophisticated statistical exercises and typology formulations, none of the cross-national research into social policy of the 1980s included the case of Spain-or Southern welfare as whole-(Ferrera 1996). This lack of academic interest has traditionally been rooted in a cliché idea, which tends to disregard the South of Europe as a backward and underdeveloped area with respect to the core of the Old Continent (this being somewhere in Central and Northern Europe). In other words, ‘everything is different in the South’.1
