THE STATE OF THE WELFARE STATE Review of On Worlds of Welfare: Institutions and their Effects in eleven Welfare States, by J.M.Wildeboer Schut, J.C.Vrooman and P.T.de Beer (Social and Cultural Planning

The two books reviewed here are part of a torrent of recently published research into the nature, condition and reform of the welfare state. On Worlds of Welfare (here, SVdB) issues from an interdepartmental research institute run by the Dutch government. One of its goals is to locate and evaluate the Dutch welfare state in a cross-national perspective. Its wider remit is to validate the mainstream Esping-Andersen categorisation of welfare states, and to establish its implications for the traditional goals of income redistribution and poverty reduction. Changing Labour Markets, Welfare Policies and Citizenship (here, AJ) is a collection of articles organised loosely around the links between the welfare state and citizenship in the context of economic change – important, even fraught issues, in an era of concern over welfare rights, welfare dependency, and social exclusion.