The determinants of social spending in Spain, 1950-1980, Are dictatorships less redistributive?

Sergio Espuelas ()

No 240, Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia

Abstract: Most of the studies about the welfare state have focused so far on the affluent democracies. However, poorer and non-democratic countries have deserved less attention. This paper provides new evidence on the evolution of social spending in both Spain and Portugal between 1950 and 1980. Since both of them were dictatorships throughout almost the whole period, that new evidence allows us to study the relationship between dictatorships and redistribution. In addition to the level of social spending and its distribution among different items, the way in which social spending is financed is also analyzed in this paper. More exactly, the ratio of social security contributions to social spending is used as an indicator of redistribution. The main findings of this paper show that besides economic and demographic factors (as the level of GDP and the ageing of population) political factors are key determinants of social spending and the way in which it is funded. During the time-period 1950-80 dictatorships had a negative effect on social spending, and were more prone to finance social protection via social contributions, which did not imply redistribution through government budgets. Therefore, in contrast to the political legitimacy theories and those theories neglecting the role played by political factors, we find that (at least in the southern-European periphery) dictatorships were less redistributive than democracies. On the other hand, this papers findings also suggest that, rather than provoking a race to the bottom or an increase in social spending levels, globalization favored the adoption of tax-funded systems instead of contributory programs.

JEL-codes: D6 H5 I00 N34 N44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 0 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ere.ub.es/dtreball/E10240.rdf/at_download/file
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.ere.ub.es:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bar:bedcje:2010240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia Espai de Recerca en Economia, Facultat de Ciències Econòmiques. Tinent Coronel Valenzuela, Num 1-11 08034 Barcelona. Spain.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Espai de Recerca en Economia ().