ABSTRACT
The welfare state has said to be in crisis several times since what was labeled the its golden time of expansion from 1960 to the first oil crisis in the early seventies. Welfare states have been recalibrated, recast, dismantled, restructured – in fact, many other words have been used to describe the various changes in what and how the welfare states finance, and whether they deliver welfare services in cash or kind. How the balance has and is being changed between state, market, and the civil society is also continuously open for scrutiny. However, it seems that the many and varied incremental changes in welfare states on the one hand follow the historical path, (i.e. there is some path-dependency) however on the other hand the welfare states change in such a way that they are no longer the same type and model as they used to be. The question is therefore: will there still be a future for the welfare states? Or will we be moving towards a more market-based type of state where distribution of income and wealth, welfare, and various types of objective and subjective elements traditionally being part of the welfare state will be left to the market and civil society to organize and structure. Still, people have previously argued that the time of the welfare state is over. However,
before reaching such a conclusion one needs to go into why we have a welfare state, e.g. the core reasons for the welfare states as they still exist, and, therefore why there will still be a need for them in the future. This is not necessarily informing us about the optimal size, how to choose a good institutional structure, or the splitting of financing and delivery in the different welfare states. It is as if the welfare state is a piggy bank (Barr, 2001), helping increase society’s efficiency and intergenerational distribution of consumption possibilities. This last chapter will, given the topic is the future, be more speculative in its approach, although
it will draw upon the existing knowledge of the welfare states and their historical development, and how they can and have had an impact on everyday life and societies’ development. The chapter will first recapitulate why we have a welfare state, discuss the challenges for
welfare states and recent developments, and then conclude on the prospects and ideas of the welfare state in the future. Given that the analysis is not about one specific country, but more general, this also raise the question whether we will be witnessing continuously very different types of welfare states (see chapters on typologies and methods), or if welfare states will converge so that their differences are mainly the priorities made between different sectors (e.g. health, elderly, transfers, social services, families etc. – see chapters on central policy areas).
