Introduction

The welfare state is an area of public policy where only few basic changes have occurred in recent years. While almost all political and economic institutions of the communist regime were fundamentally challenged during the first five years of transition, social protection systems were largely maintained. Neither has the old welfare state been radically dismantled, as announced and repeatedly demanded by prominent economic liberals in the wake of the peaceful revolutions. Nor have postcommunist social reformers succeeded in transforming it into some variant of “the strong” West European welfare state, as initially intended. Compared with those areas of societal transformation considered in the previous chapters, welfare state institutions, on the whole, have remained notably stable. New institutions were only created, so as to respond to emerging unemployment and mounting poverty.

The present chapter aims to outline the state of reform in the countries under study. It takes a largely descriptive account and analyzes the steps that have actually been taken in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia over the period 1989 to mid 1995 to reform the old welfare regimes. Their main characteristics are briefly described in section 2. Section 3 looks at main policy areas and sketches the institutional changes that have occurred so far. The presentation is confined to identifying main trends and qualitative variations. Moreover, the outline cannot claim to be either complete or fully up-to-date because the national social protection systems have been constantly under revision in the period considered.