Globalization and its impact on the welfare state concept in developed and developing countries

• Main Author: Ang, Alvin P
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2018
• Subjects: Welfare state; globalization; common agenda; divergences; Economics
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/economics-faculty-pubs/25; http://revista-estudios.revistas.deusto.es/article/view/1456/1780
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This paper is an attempt to link Globalization with the ideas of Welfare State. There are notions that the Welfare State is severely challenged by the borderless approach of globalization. While welfare regimes are focused on the need of specific countries, the need to be competitive against other countries is observed to be putting significant pressures for countries to have common welfare programs. Nonetheless, this challenge is not simple considering that the provision of welfare programs are not products of recent developments but of old traditions that have helped countries to where they are now. At the same time, younger nations are developing their own welfare regimes tailored to their own governance capacities and economic agenda. With these differences, globalization is seen to be a rallying or a diverging point depending on which side will one nation benefits the most. Using different lenses and approaches, we conclude that globalization has in fact strengthened and improved welfare systems in developed countries where they converged instead of diverging from each other. Developing states, on the hand, have different welfare regimes that they are adapting not in a straight line but in a case approach to globalization. This is the reason why we do not have a common welfare regime for these countries.