福祉型財政의 傾向分析과 社會福祉豫算의 國際比較에 關한 硏究

The Trends Analysis of Welfare Expenditure and It’s International Comparison

In my article, the nature, concept and development of social welfare state are examind in some detail. I shall focus particularly on the structural roots of public expenditure, the ideological roots of public expenditure, social security spending as a percent of GNP at factor cost, welfare expenditure trends and the international comparison for social security efforts. The welfare state is at once one of the great structural uniformities of modern society and, paradoxically, one of its most striking diversities. Scholars impressed by the convergence of urban-industrial societies toward some common “post-industrial” condition can see in every rich country seven or eight health and welfare programs with similar content and expanded funding-even some convergence in methods of financing and administration. The essence of the welfare state is government protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health, housing, and education, assured to every citizen as a political right, not as charity. This articl explores two basic problems in the study of rich (or “post-industrial”) societies: first, the interplay of affluence, economic system, administrative system, and welfare ideology; second, the effect of social organnization on the behavior of political elites. The behavior at issue is the allocation of scarce resources to government programs of health, education, welfare, and housing. My main aim is to discover the structural and cultural determinants of the welfare state and to explain why rich countries, having adopted similar health and welfare programs, diverge so sharply in their levels of spending, organization and administration of services and benefits, and styles of administration. Here is a preview of the argument. On the basis of a cross-sectional analysis of countries, I conclude that economic growth and its demographic and bureaucratic out-comes are the root cause of the general emergence of the welfare state-the establishment of similar programs of social security, the increasing fraction of GNP devoted to such programs, the trend toward comprehensive coverage and similar methods of financing. It is apparent that the more highly in dustrialized countries tend to spend larger proportions of their national incomes on social security programs than underdeveloped countries. Among the more industrialized countries there is no very consistent relationship between national income per capita and the proportion of the national income represented by social security expenditures, although expenditures in such high-income countries as the United States, Canada, and Switzerland are considerably smaller in relation to the national income than in some of the countries with much lower per capita incomes, such as Austria and Italy. However, there appears to be some tendency for the countries with the oldest social security programs of a relatively modern type to maintain comparatively high benefit levels in their social security programs and also to spend relatively large amounts on them as a percntage of national income. In Western European countries, as well as in the British Commonwealth, public welfare expenditures tend to represent all appreciably large proportion of the national income. Highly useful for pruposes of comparison, since they conform reasonably closely to our definition of public welfare expenditures, are the data on social security benefits and “other current transfers” in 15 countries published by the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. Conforming less closely to our definition, since they include payments to vendors of madical care under health insurance or health service programs, but nevertheless useful for comparisons embracing a larger number of countries are data on social security expenditures prepared by the international Labour Office.