Linking social expenditures to household lifestyles

Communities and governments in all societies provide social assistance for temporary setbacks and long-lasting misfortunes that befall individuals and households. EU countries have traditionally provided a relatively extensive safety net supported by the success of their market economies. Now EU social welfare systems are being subjected to massive shifts in demographics, to difficulty in financing social services, and to changing notions about the social contract. There is reason to believe that self-reliance will become more important than in the past at least for certain segments of the EU population. Households, along with corporate and government decision-makers, are key economic actors within civic society and potential agents of social change. Bold scenarios about the future and analysis rooted in social science theory and method can be a powerful combination for informing personal and community initiatives as well as social welfare policies. Structural economics is a framework for organising quantitative information about production and consumption activities into a database and using it to analyse scenarios about the future. Through the social accounting matrix, this approach is generalised to describe activities of social institutions and link technological changes to changes in social structures. This matrix is also useful in its own right as a set of consistent descriptive statistics that are an extension of data collected by national statistical offices.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.