The Welfare State Revisited (Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia: Challenges in Development and Globalization)

The welfare state has been under attack for decades, but now more than ever there is a need for strong social protection systems―the best tools we have to combat inequality, support social justice, and even improve economic performance. In this book, José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz bring together distinguished contributors to examine the global variations of social programs and make the case for a redesigned twenty-first-century welfare state.

The Welfare State Revisited takes on major debates about social well-being, considering the merits of universal versus targeted policies; responses to market failures; integrating welfare and economic development; and how welfare states around the world have changed since the neoliberal turn. Contributors offer prescriptions for how to respond to the demands generated by demographic changes, the changing role of the family, new features of labor markets, the challenges of aging societies, and technological change. They consider how strengthening or weakening social protection programs affects inequality, suggesting ways to facilitate the spread of effective welfare states throughout the world, especially in developing countries. Presenting new insights into the functions the welfare state can fulfill and how to design a more efficient and more equitable system, The Welfare State Revisited is essential reading on the most discussed issues in social welfare today.

José Antonio Ocampo is codirector of Banco de la Republica (Colombia’s central bank), professor in the School of International and Public Affairs (on leave for public service), and copresident of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. His books with Columbia University Press are Growth and Policy in Developing Countries: A Structuralist Approach (2009, coauthor), Development Cooperation in Times of Crisis (2012, coedited with José Antonio Alonso), and Too Little, Too Late: The Quest to Resolve Sovereign Debt Crises (2016, also coedited with Joseph E. Stiglitz), and The Welfare State Revisited (2018).