Social Protection Systems from a Global Perspective: Evidence from a Model Family Approach

Background: “No poverty” is the top objective among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations. While governments around the world adopt various ideologies and social policies to tackle the thorny poverty issues, there still is a great need for knowledge on how to construct more effective social protection systems. In Wood and Gough’s (2006) seminal work on global welfare regimes, he classified countries’ various welfare approaches into welfare states (social democratic, conservative, and liberal regimes), informal security welfare regimes (represented by Latin American and Asian countries), and insecurity welfare regimes (represented by African countries). However, studies are contested regarding whether such classifications are applicable in the contemporary world, after reforms of social protection systems over time (Böger & Öktem, 2019; Hudson & Kühner, 2012; Kühner & Nakray, 2017). In this paper, we adopt the model family approach to advance theoretical knowledge on global welfare regimes by investigating social safety net features across 40 nations/societies across continents.

Methods: The model family approach entails collecting income-packaging data for a given income level and family type. Income packages include information on labor income, welfare benefits, tax and social security contributions, and the cost of services. The income levels include families with no earnings, families with one earner earning minimum wage, half of the national average wage (NAW), or NAW, and families with two earners. The family types include single adults, single-parent families with a child aged below one year, single-parent families with a child aged 5 years, single-parent families with two children aged 7 and 14 years, and the corresponding two-adult families. In total, we collect income-packaging data from more than 2000 model families in 2023. We calculated benefit adequacy by summing the amount of entitled living, nutrition, child benefit, fertility, nutrition, housing, medical, childcare, education subsidies, tax benefit, and other subsidies after tax, social security contributions, and costs of services relative to NAW. We further analyze the extent to which welfare benefits alleviate relative poverty in each given society. We analyze the data using descriptive statistics and regression analyses.

Results: Our results demonstrate that some East Asian societies provide more generous social assistance welfare benefits than their European counterparts. These preliminary findings challenge the traditional notion that Western welfare states are inherently more generous than non-Western nations. However, certain developing countries, such as Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Russia, and Thailand, exhibit the least generous welfare systems, alongside Bulgaria and Romania. The remaining countries are divided between European nations that offer generous social assistance and a group of Eastern European countries that prioritize providing generous child benefits rather than social assistance benefits.

Implications: This paper can expand the understanding of global welfare regime patterns in the post-pandemic era. By using the model family approach, this study can generate knowledge based on social protection systems not known before in prior welfare literature. Findings from this study can also provide evidence to inform governments to reevaluate and redesign their social welfare policies.