Welfare and Redistribution in Post-communist Countries

Welfare states are frequently defined and classified in terms of the breadth of state activity and the breadth of services provided that protect the population from untempered market forces. As set out by Esping-Andersen (1990), and following Polanyi’s interpretation of capitalist development, they express state involvement to make living standards independent of pure market forces (1990, p. 3). Although a logical starting point, this notion can be applied with the same precision neither to state socialist societies nor to all of those emerging from transformations of the 1990s. State provision of distinct services was combined with provision and social protection directly by producing enterprises and with a variety of informal adaptations that continued, or grew, in importance in some countries in the 1990s. This precludes any precise fit with Esping-Andersen’s (1990) three ideal types, built from experience of advanced countries — liberal, corporatist and social democratic — which describe systems with limited and conditional benefits — those with state involvement in provision but still with stratification of social-insurance-based benefits and an assumption of traditional family forms — and systems with universal benefits.