New Books In Economics

Generous welfare states are losing their key characteristics, not least in Sweden, where privatisation of funding has proceeded privatisation of provision, beginning in the 1990s. Supplementary exclusionary sources of welfare in healthcare, education, and social care, have proliferated throughout European welfare states under the neoliberal agenda that has dominated debate across the developed world. Rather than full privatisation, we see semi-private solutions, in which the citizen becomes the consumer, but remains subsidised by the state in their pursuit of private welfare, via tax breaks that benefit the richest in society most, rather than those with the greatest need. At the same time, private providers have been able to free-ride on the state, for example by hiring like doctors and teachers trained on state-funded courses, whilst the divided welfare state erodes the more generous, universal system by undermining the trust in it and the willingness of people to contribute to it. Ultimately, it replaces o