Welfare Regime Changes and Inter Cohort Inequalities and the Dynamics of Social Generations
The generational sustainability of welfare regimes is of central importance to most long-term analyses of welfare state reforms (see for example: Esping-Andersen et al., 2002). There are strong interaction between welfare regime and intra cohort inequalities (Mayer, 2005). A complement to these analyses shows that changes in intra versus inter cohort inequalities are major outcomes or consequences of the trajectories of the different welfare regimes. Previous comparative research papers show the difference between France and the United-States, since the American intracohort inequalities have increased strongly for the last three decades, when the French case show less intracohort inequalities and more intercohort imbalances at the expense of younger generations of adults (Chauvel 2006). Here, we propose a comparison between the British, Finnish, French, and Italian dynamics of distribution of after tax and transfers equivalised income by age, period and cohort, to assess how different welfare regimes faced different trade-offs between intra and inter cohort inequality. The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data are used to analyze the transformations of the intra cohort inequalities (based on interdecile ratios) and the changes in the cohort life chances (with age-period-cohorts models of analysis of divergence to the linear trends). The main result is that the conservative and the familialistic welfare regimes are marked by more inter-cohort inequalities to the expense of young social generations, when the social-democrat and the liberal ones show less inter-cohort redistribution of resources, and more intra-cohort inequality, particularly in the case of the UK. Is it the result of a logics of communicating vessels : the stronger is the “socioeconomic solidarity between family generations toward the generation of children”, the weaker the “social welfare based solidarity between social generations for the integration of the social generations of young adults”.
Chevel, L.