Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe

by Stephan Haggard, Robert R. Kaufman

This is the first book to compare the distinctive welfare states of Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman trace the historical origins of social policy in these regions to crucial political changes in the mid-twentieth century, and show how the legacies of these early choices are influencing welfare reform following democratization and globalization.


After World War II, communist regimes in Eastern Europe adopted wide-ranging socialist entitlements while conservative dictatorships in East Asia sharply limited social security but invested in education. In Latin America, where welfare systems were instituted earlier, unequal social-security systems favored formal sector workers and the middle class.


Haggard and Kaufman compare the different welfare paths of the countries in these regions following democratization and the move toward more open economies. Although these transformations generated pressure to reform existing welfare systems, economic performance and welfare legacies exerted a more profound influence. The authors show how exclusionary welfare systems and economic crisis in Latin America created incentives to adopt liberal social-policy reforms, while social entitlements from the communist era limited the scope of liberal reforms in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. In East Asia, high growth and permissive fiscal conditions provided opportunities to broaden social entitlements in the new democracies.


This book highlights the importance of placing the contemporary effects of democratization and globalization into a broader historical context.

496 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2008

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

This made my head spin a bit. I think it was a little too ambitious of the authors to include the developing welfare states of the countries of East Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America in a 500 page book. The book is very descriptive (saying what actually happened) with only the short conclusion being prescriptive and predictive (what should or will happen). The huge differences in the countries described, while interesting, made it difficult to form conclusions. We're dealing with Eastern Europe transitioning from authoritarian communist regimes (a fascinating and unprecedented period I'd like to read more about) to Latin America which includes everything from democracies to authoritarian regimes (often military coups backed by the US) to East Asian countries including post-British colonial nations to semi-democracies to authoritarian regimes and the Philippines which seem like the exception to every Asian rule. From this mass of data and charts, all very scholarly and well done, the conclusion seems to be that democratic nations, while still having problems such as pork barrel vote buying, seem to get social spending more correct in the long run. Authoritarian regimes have the freedom to push through mass change, like dictator Pinochet's Milton Friedman inspired reforms, but they tend to get corrected in the long run as resentful citizens push to reclaim their freedoms. Democracy is sloppy but it seems to work reasonably well in a complex world where there is an unintended consequence to every reform. Also interesting was the prediction 10 years ago when this was published that Fukuyama was wrong in that the victories of neoliberal economics (free international markets and privatization of the public sphere) were permanent. As of now, free markets seem to be out of fashion. So, to sum up, this was interesting but dry and with possibly too much info for one book. Three books for the three regions seem justified to give each their proper attention.

[Byunghwan "Ben" Son · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is an ambitious project that examines evolution (probably the expansion, entrenchment and/or retrenchment depending on the context) of welfare states in the three regions, namely East Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Combining quantitative analyses with comparative case studies, the authors find fiscal conditions amid the process of democratization to be an important, if not the most important, determinant for varied development paths of welfare states of these regions: democratization was generally welfare-expanding in East Asia where fiscal problems were not too pernicious to national economies (even in the aftermath of the 1997 Crisis) while quite the opposite was the case in Latin America (EE seems to stand in the middle). The book may serve well as a reader for advanced undergrad classes or lower-level graduate classes.