Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Welfare State Revisited, argues that, more than ever, there is a need for a strong welfare state. In particular, it is essential to face the strong inequality trends that have been in place in large parts of the world since the last decades of the twentieth century. The book also argues that a twenty-first-century welfare state will have to be different from those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It must be redesigned in a way that is consistent with a coherent vision of its role in the economic and social system today. And it must respond to the demands generated in many parts of the world by demographic changes, the changing role of the family, new features of labor markets, technologi- cal change, and the fiscal constraints created by tax competition in the glo- balized world. To do this, it must borrow from research in recent decades that has provided new insights into the roles that the welfare state has to perform and how to design a better, more efficient, and equitable system, research that is summarized by the authors in this volume.The volume is organized in two parts. The first analyzes the conceptual issues associated with the challenges outlined above. The second focuses on the experience of specific regions or countries. These experiences are those of the European Union, Scandinavia, the United States (also analyzed in several chapters in the first part), Latin America (the region of the develop- ing world that has had the most significant advances in social protection in the early twenty-first century), and one of the most interesting initiatives put in place in the developing world in recent times, India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.