Studies of the welfare state usually try to find out which factors have contributed to its ascendancy since the end of the nineteenth century and which factors explain the various approaches different countries took in providing a new social insurance to cover new social risks in industrialized...

It has been recognized since the publication of Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism that the advanced Western welfare state comes in-at least-three variants: as a Nordic social-democratic regime, a conservative regime on the European continent or as a liberal welfare state...

This paper analyzes 'globalization' as the interplay between domestic and 'foreign' economic agents that seek to break up nationally contained and/or institutionally constrained markets with the aim of altering distributive outcomes in their favor. I take as my exemplary cases the recent opening...