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The different development of child and elderly care in the Netherlands reflects the hybrid character of its welfare system, which, until the 1980s, featured both social democratic and conservative elements. While public involvement in the provision of elderly care services rapidly increased after the Second World War, childcare remained a family affair well into the 1980s. Under recent neo-liberal influences these trends have been reversed. Public investments in childcare have grown exponentially, while several governments have attempted to cut expenses on elderly care services. This article descriptively compares these contrasting processes and puts them into historical and comparative perspective. It is argued that pillarization has contributed to the comparatively strong hybridization of the Dutch system of welfare and social care. In addition, different cultures of child and elderly care contributed to different developments in both policy fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scandinavia is, in spite of a few weaknesses, still a socio-economic model for countries that do not want to follow the Anglo-Saxon route of far-reaching liberalization of the labour market and the welfare state. Most striking is the combination of high employment (including high public sector employment), the facilitation of employment for women, relatively low inequality and poverty, solid public finances and top-level competitiveness, particularly in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the implications of the Scandinavian model of social, economic and political advancement for Europe as a whole. According to the author, the model depicts a considerable interest between capitalism and socialism which enables Scandinavian countries to attain rapid increase, welfare state sustainment and establish mechanism to advance their employment rate. It also discusses the attained distinction of its members in terms of social and democratic traditions and corporatism as well as the negative and positive aspects of the model.

In recent years it has been said that the Dutch welfare state has been made fit for employment growth. This development is praised as part of the so-called Dutch 'Delta model' which since the mid-1980s has been very successful in labour market terms. Some 20 years ago, when unemployment started to soar, the high level of social security was seen, by contrast, as an aspect of the ‘Dutch disease’. Employing a typology based on regulative assumptions of dealing with market risks and aberrations, this paper briefly analyses the subsequent stages of Dutch welfare state development: from a predominantly Christian-paternalist system to social-democratization from the mid-1960s and then to a certain degree of liberalization since the mid-1980s. The structural or institutional inertia of the original system should not be overlooked, however. Comparative investigation reveals that the current Dutch welfare state, in spite of retrenchment measures, still belongs to the most generous ones in the western world, which allows only for relatively low, though rising, levels of poverty and inequality. And it is questionable whether and to what extent retrenchment has contributed to the impressive, although largely part-time-based rise in the Dutch employment rate. In any case nonemployment, broadly understood as different from registered unemployment, has not declined in the Netherlands. It has been redistributed to other categories, particularly to the disability scheme. Like other continental countries, the Netherlands still seems to face the dilemma of work and welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]