Cash Versus Services: ‘Worlds of Welfare’ and the Decommodification of Cash Benefits and Health Care Services

By C. Bambra. Journal of Social Policy, 2005

250 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Welfare state models have focused almost exclusively on the study of cash benefits, and typologies established on this limited basis have been used to generalise about all forms of welfare state provision. This ignores the fact that welfare states are also about the actual delivery of services and/or that countries vary in terms of the relative emphasis that they place upon cash benefits and welfare state services. This article explores the cash and services mix in, and between, welfare states with reference to recent welfare state typologies, most notably Esping-Andersen's decommodification-centred ‘worlds of welfare’. It compares the decommodification levels of the main cash benefits with the main area of service provision: health care. The resulting analysis suggests that when services are added into the comparative analysis of welfare state regimes there are five welfare state clusters: Social Democratic, Liberal, Conservative, and sub-groups within both the Liberal and Conservative regimes. The article concludes that, in order to maintain integrity or generalisability, future welfare state typologies need to reflect more adequately the role of services in welfare state provision.

Subfields: Education, Finance, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cbee966d3e609f4d496496e6fa9d0b94f05f4bf1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. J. Jordan
2. C. Jensen
3. Anne West
4. Rita Nikolai
5. C. Bambra

In Finance

1. Anne West
2. Rita Nikolai
3. J. Jordan
4. C. Jensen
5. C. Bambra
6. A. Barrientos
7. M. Powell

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Anne West
2. Rita Nikolai
3. C. Jensen
4. J. Jordan
5. C. Bambra
6. A. Barrientos
7. M. Powell

Citations in the corpus

• Welfare Regimes and Education Regimes: Equality of Opportunity and Expenditure in the EU (and US) (2013, background): “However, Jensen (2008) has proposed that welfare regimes might be conceptualised along two dimensions − transfers and services − and stressed the need for a better understanding of different sectors, in particular education (cf., Bambra, 2005).”
• Does the size of the tourism sector influence the economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic? (2021, background): “The effect of healthcare expenditure on CESI scores is ambiguous a priori, and the estimate will depend on the priorities of the relevant government and society–that is ‘cash versus services’ (Bambra, 2005).”
• Worlds of welfare services and transfers (2008, background): “In the few existing studies explicitly dealing with the differences between transfers and welfare services, this has failed to be fully recognized (Kautto, 2002; Bambra, 2005, but see Note 1).”
• Defamilisation and welfare state regimes: a cluster analysis (2007, background): “…welfare state regimes, would be a useful conceptual addition to analyses of income protection and social expenditure (Bonoli, 1997; Castles & Mitchell, 1993; Esping-Andersen, 1990; Ferrera, 1996; Korpi & Palme, 1998; Leibfreid, 1992; Pitruzzello, 1999) or welfare service provision (Bambra, 2005ab).”
• Policy feedback and support for the welfare state (2013, background): “Though countries may fall into broad regime categories, specific sectors of the welfare state may diverge significantly from the overarching structure of the welfare state (Bambra, 2005).”
• Research Note: Decommodification and the worlds of welfare revisited (2006, methodology): “…from a larger research project, the focus of which was the re-examination of Esping-Andersen’s (1990) influential ‘Three Worlds of Welfare’ thesis (from now on TWW) and the extension of its principles into other policy areas – notably health care (Bambra, 2005a; 2005b) and gender (Bambra, 2004).”