Characteristic of Germany and the Netherland's Welfare Systems

Germany

Germany’s welfare state was introduced under Bismarck during the 19th century. His welfare system would survive throughout Germany’s existence and continue in West Germany after the nation’s spit following World War Two. The traditional system has four main characteristics which remained generally unchanged up until the Chancellor Kolh’s administration.

The first of these characteristics is that it was a wage-centred social insurance system. Rather than a general tax the system is financed by wage-based contributions, which allows for the contributor to more closely get out what he paid into. Secondly the system put emphasis on the male breadwinner, where most benefits are be paid to the patriarch of a family. This coincides with the third characteristic of familialism which expects German households to take care things such as childcare. Finally the German welfare system is one that is corporatist in nature, this puts the system in an interesting position as it controlled by both business representatives and social partners. In this section we will come to see how these aspects have been affected by retrenchment and reform.

Over the past half century the German welfare state has experienced some incremental changes to its policies. We will now look the four past coalition governments and what they have legislated in terms of reform. Starting in 1972 the SPO-FDP coalition had plans on deepening and enlarging the current system, these measures were nevertheless halted during the Oil Crisis of 1973. Starting from 1975 Chancellor Helmond introduced a series of cuts to unemployment benefits and pensions along with scrapping programmes earlier implemented that promoted individual training. Eligibility rules for unemployment be...

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...ty in favor of policies that aided individuals to reintegrate into the job market. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Dutch policy responded to this by scaling back disability availability; scaling back benefits and duration of benefits. In 1996 the Dutch parliament abolished the Sickness Act shifting the financial burden of disability and illness from the welfare state to the private sector for two years with the intention of fully privatizing the insurance scheme but this never came to fruition.

In 2006 the most recent reform to disability, the Work and Income According to Capacity Act was enacted. The act clarifies the difference between welfare and workfare. Welfare being defined as a “collective social protection in the form of passive income protection” and workfare defined as a “collective social protection provided in an attempt to improve employment.”(P433)