The European welfare states developed very different strategies to cope with the effects of the financial crises. While some governments pursue a strategy of strict austerity and state limitation others have expanded public programs to mitigate the social decline. However, in almost all European countries we can discover currently a general trend moving away from mere redistributive approaches of de-commodification to social investment programs aiming to strengthen the human capital of the citizens. This particularly holds true for: (1) The establishment of care systems for children in pre-school age is aiming to (re-)integrate particularly women in the labour market earlier and to counter the risk of poverty and dependence of single parents. (2) Too, the expansion of reconciliation policies is aiming to integrate parents and nursing relatives earlier in the labour market and to enable a more equal sharing of family work which achieves higher employment rates in a long-term perspective. (3) The expansion and differentiation of active labour market policies is aiming to enable the citizens to qualify themselves and to avoid long-term unemployment which is currently one of the major challenges of many European welfare systems as a consequence of the financial crises.( 4) The deepening of prevention, care and public health programmes aiming to lower the escalating public expenditures caused by the demographic change and the development in healthcare.
The presentation we will give a comparative overview how the social investment agenda in these policy fields has developed in ten European countries within recent years and identify commonalities and differences. It is based on qualitative and quantitative data that has been collected in the context of the innosi project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program (www.innosi.eu).
