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The Age-Orientation of Social Policy Regimes in OECD Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2001

JULIA LYNCH
JULIA LYNCH
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, 210 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720, jflynch@socrates.berkeley.edu
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Abstract

This article presents a series of measures of the extent to which social policies in twenty-one OECD countries are oriented towards the support of elderly (over 65 or in formal retirement) and non-elderly (under 65 and not retired) population groups. Employing breakdowns by age in spending on social insurance, education and health, tax expenditures on welfare substituting goods, and housing policy outcomes, this article shows that countries tend to demonstrate a consistent age-orientation across a variety of policy areas and instruments. After correcting for the demographic structure of the population, Greece, Japan, Italy, Spain and the United States have the most elderly-oriented social policy regimes, while the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada and the Nordic countries have a more age-neutral repertoire of social policies. In identifying the age-orientation of social policy as a dimension of distributive politics that is not captured by other welfare state typologies, this article suggests the need to develop new accounts of the development of welfare states that include the dimension of age.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 2001 , pp. 411 - 436
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The author acknowledges the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute for International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for financial support during the research and writing of this article. Thanks are due to Sara Watson, Maurizio Ferrera, Tim Smeeding, the fellows of the 1998-99 European Forum on ‘Recasting Social Welfare in Europe’ at the European University Institute, and the two anonymous reviewers for this journal, for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. Deficiencies in the final product of course remain the sole responsibility of the author.