Practice question · True or false
Aggregate social protection expenditure as a share of GDP across western Europe has fallen steeply since the crisis literature began in the early 1980s.
Hints
- Ask what the Eurostat series shows for the EU average.
- The changes have been in composition and eligibility rather than in the total.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. The aggregate has been broadly stable or rising, running at roughly a quarter to just under 30 per cent of GDP in recent years, with a spike in 2020. Pierson’s explanation is that programmes create constituencies that make visible cuts costly, so retrenchment happens through eligibility and indexation instead.
Practise The Crisis of the Welfare State
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