First published in 1997, this volume examines why, while mature welfare states are being trimmed and privatised, new social welfare arrangement are implemented in formerly communist and newly industrialised countries. The papers in this volume bring together these different worlds, but also different academic approaches. Micro-economic analyses of social insurance and welfare systems are joined with broader political descriptions of social policy in such disparate regions as Scandinavia, China, Italy, Poland and South Africa. They give the reader a sense of the fundamental problem of...