Negotiating Welfare in Postcommunist States

Comparative Politics. 2007. Vol. 40. No. 1. P. 41–62.

Cook L. J.

Welfare states everywhere have been under pressure to retrench and restructure, to reduce public expenditures, and to adopt market-conforming welfare models. Such pressures have been especially intense in postcommunist East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. As these countries moved into market transition and recession during the early 1990s, their inherited systems of broad, basic social provision became financially unsustainable and ineffective. In response, most governments initiated reform projects based on a liberal paradigm of reduced subsidies and entitlements and social sector privatization, projects that would move the balance in welfare provision away from the state and far toward the market. Yet the patterns of retrenchment and liberalization in postcommunist states diverged in puzzling ways.

Keywords: благосостояние, postcommunist countries, постсоветские страны, welfare