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UNRISD Colloquium to Reflect on the State of the Scandinavian Welfare State
14 Aug 2002
“The End of the Scandinavian Welfare State?”
On Monday 16 September 2002, 14:30, Professor Stein Kuhnle, Head of Comparative Politics Department, University Bergen, will give a presentation on “The End of the Scandinavian Welfare State?”.
Venue
Room A206, Palais des Nations, Geneva. Participants arriving through the Place des Nations Gate should enter through Door 9 and those arriving through the Pregny Gate (facing the ICRC building) should enter through Door 11.
Background
UNRISD has commissioned Professor Kuhnle to write a background paper together with Sven Hort, Professor of sociology, Södertörn University, on the lessons of the developmental welfare state in Scandinavia for the developing world. This will feed into UNRISD’s project on ‘Social Policy in a Development Context’, which aims to study a state-society nexus that is developmental, democratic and socially inclusive. The developmental experiences of the Scandinavian welfare states are important in this respect, since they have shown that a combination of comprehensive welfare and social security programmes and economic growth is possible.
Kuhnle and Hort’s background paper will address the following questions: What was the economic justification for the welfare state in Scandinavian countries, especially in times of economic downturn? Are there the moral grounds of the welfare state in terms of democracy and social equality? What lessons can be drawn for developing countries?
Stein Kuhnle is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen since 1982, where his major area of research has been historical and comparative studies of welfare state development in Scandinavia and Europe. In recent years he has extended his research to include comparative studies of social policy development in East and South-east Asia. He has published widely and among his recent publications in are (ed.) Survival of the European Welfare State (London/ New York: Routledge 2000) and ”The Nordic welfare state in a European context: dealing with new economic and ideological challenges in the 1990s”, European Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 379-398 (2000). With Hort he has published ”The coming of the East and South-east Asian welfare states”, Journal of European Social Policy, Vol. 10, No. 2, 162-184 (May 2000).
Information
Convenor: Huck-ju Kwon (Research Coordinator, UNRISD)
For information on this event, please contact: Justin MacDermott at UNRISD, Tel: 022 917 29 45