Gosta Esping-Andersen, Europe's leading analyst of the welfare state, presents a provocative examination of postindustrial economies at the end of the twentieth century. This book takes a second look at the driving forces of economic transformation in a more sociological and institutional way. As a result, what stands out is postindustrial diversity, not convergence.

Europe's mass unemployment and the call for extensive labor market de-regulation have, perhaps more than any other contemporary issue, impassioned political debate and academic research. With contributions from economists, political scientists and sociologists, Why Deregulate Labour Markets? takes a hard look at the empirical connections between unemployment and regulation in Europe today, utilizing both in-depth nation analyses and broader-based international comparisons.

This text provides a comparative analysis of contemporary and future changes in welfare states, looking at the different patterns found in Europe, North America, the Antipodes, and the emerging scenarios in Latin America, East Asia and Central and Eastern Europe.

Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of the welfare states in Western societies. The author aims to provide an analysis of the character and future of welfare institutions and discusses several types of welfare state, connecting these with variations in the historical development of different Western countries. Current economic processes, the author argues, such as those moving towards a post-industrial order, are not shaped by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences.

Our future depends very much on how we respond to three great challenges of the new century, all of which threaten to increase social inequality: first, how we adapt institutions to the new role of women - the 'incomplete revolution' of our time; second, how we prepare our children for the knowledge economy; and, third, how we respond to the new demography, in particular low fertility and an ageing population.

In this new book Gosta Esping-Andersen - the leading analyst of the welfare state - examines how different societies have responded to these challenges. It focuses...