Gender and social policy in middle-income countries: comparative welfare regime analysis of fiscal policies

ABSTRACT

Gosta Esping-Andersen (1990), in his ground-breaking book, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, created a decommodification index to classify advanced capitalist countries into the liberal, conservative-corporatist, and social-democratic welfare regimes. One of the most common criticisms of Esping-Andersen’s typology by feminists such as Jane Lewis (1992) is that it is ‘male-centric’ and did not address women’s unpaid work with families. Ann Shola Orloff (1993) has gone a step further in the criticism of Esping-Andersen’s typology by addressing women’s opportunity to paid employment and the capability to establish and run an independent households. I originally used the framework to analyse the socio-legal dimensions of expenditure in MICs; in this paper, the decommodification index has focused on variables that are on the fiscal side. Theoretically, this paper contributes to gender and social policy discussions on women’s access to employment and related entitlements. Empirically, it creates clusters of MICs into three based on latent class analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis of economic, social, and legal variables, such as availability of non-tax benefits to private child-care centres, provision of child-care services by the government; tax-deductible payments for child-care; provision of legal-aid for family and criminal issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Decommodification
• gender
• maternity policies
• legal aid
• welfare/social provisions

Acknowledgements

This study was conceptualised by the author during her research stay at Central European University (2016-2017) which was funded by Open Society Foundation. I am grateful to Dr Greg McMahon for the statistical analysis, Professor Laura Seelkopf, LMU Munich for sharing the study materials; Dr Feona Attwood and the peer-reviewers for supportive comments which have helped my study. I gratefully acknowledge the support the participants at the Social Policy Conference, University of Durham where I presented the draft version of the paper. A special mention to Dr Blu Tirolh for her clear, transparent, and supportive editorship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ? A range of computations was performed for a range of 3–6 classes. The optimum number of classes was determined by the minimum calculated Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) value, which have maximum likelihood theory as their basis. Both AIC and BIC minima agreed that three latent classes were optimum for the data set in this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keerty Nakray

Keerty Nakray is a Professor at the Jindal Global Law School, NCR Delhi, and Adjunct Faculty at Centre for Ethics, Yenepoya (Deemed to be University), Mangalore (India). She holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland. Based on her PhD titled ‘Gender Budgeting and Its Implications on Social Policy: A Study of HIV/AIDS in India’ and post-doctoral research she has edited two books ”Social Science Research Ethics for a Globalizing World: Inter-disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Perspectives” (Routledge, New York) with Margaret Alston and Kerri Whittenbury and ”Gender Based Violence and Public Health: International Perspectives on Budgets and Policies” published by (Routledge, London). She has published in leading global journals on gender budgets, child sensitive budgets and comparative social policy. She has received research grants International Growth Centre, Foundation for Urban Studies, Social Policy Association (UK).