Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Background/Purpose:  Demographic and economic trends seem to have outpaced the capacity of many welfare states to respond adequately to a new set of family needs consequent to the demise of the male breadwinner model in favor of women’s participation in the labor force.  As a partial remedy, economists argue that human capital investments made during early childhood, such as supports and services for quality care and education, reduce inequality and raise the overall productivity of societies, particularly for disadvantaged children.

Variations across countries reveal that some welfare states may be better adapted to meet the challenges of a polarizing, globalized economy by providing sufficient support to families engaged in childrearing. This presentation addresses the question, “To what extent do patterns of public investments in young children conform to standard regime types and theories of welfare state change?”

This study contributes to the field by measuring government investments in young children through the development of a set of indicators that combines quantitative data for expenditures with descriptors for policy design. The indicators are then used to compare countries within and across regime types, drawing on theoretical models of welfare state change.

Methods:  Ten member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are selected as examples of five pairs of welfare state regimes:  (1) social democratic (Norway and Sweden); (2) conservative, Central European (France and Germany); (3) Southern European (Italy and Spain); (4) Asian (Japan and Korea); and (5) liberal, market-based (United Kingdom and United States).

Public investment in young children is operationalized through a series of three child investment indices:  “Child allowances,” “Paid Parental Leave,” and “Early Childhood Education and Care.” The indices are based on cross-country data regarding family benefits between 2001 and 2011 in the OECD’s Social Expenditure Database.  Expenditure data are supplemented by policy descriptions from the annual OECD Benefits and Wagesseries and other OECD reports that indicate how government benefits related to young children are distributed in the population.

Results:  Across the three indices, Norway and Sweden displayed conformity to a social democratic regime type that was discernible from other regimes by high levels of investment in young children.  Other country pairs were decidedly less distinctive in maintaining fidelity to a regime-based pattern, and thus invite explanations of policy development through alternative theories of welfare state change.   

Conclusion and Implications: Overall, neither regime type nor any single theory of welfare state change appears to provide the specificity necessary to understand more nuanced differences across developed nations with respect to national policies for investments in young children that have potential for equalizing life chances. By parsing government investments in early childhood into several distinctive program types – cash allowances, paid parental leave, and benefits for early childhood care and education – distinctions between countries become more salient to understanding policy development than affiliation with a uniform pattern of welfare state change.