Abstract
Belgium’s trajectory during the period of crisis turned out to be special and even intriguing. The country was remarkably resilient and stable in the face of the crisis. Some observers have attributed this to the fact that Belgium went without a government for 15 months, causing it not to introduce austerity packages as happened in many other countries. We argue that what made Belgium so resilient during the crisis was not the lack of a government per se, nor the absence of budget cuts as such. The main reason was that Belgium’s welfare system contains many automatic stabilizers. Looking beyond the crisis period, we argue that the past decades were marked by a transition towards a welfare state with a stronger emphasis on activation, minimum income protection and attention to new social risks such as lone parenthood and long-term unemployment. Social policy in Belgium has not remained inert in the face of a number of new social challenges but reforms have not been radical enough. Belgium’s structural performance on key dimensions of welfare state outcomes has deteriorated to a level that at best can be labelled as mediocre.
Oh strangest of all strangenesses, the deep longing for the whole world to be more like Belgium.
(John Lanchester 2011)
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Notes
- 1.
Paul Krugman (2013) made a similar point, comparing Belgium and the Netherlands. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/a-tale-of-two-flat-countries/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
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Acknowledgments
We thank the editors and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and feedback. Our former colleague Tim Van Rie has provided very substantive input into this chapter but wishes to remain unnamed as author so as to avoid any conflict of interest with his new employer, the European Commission.
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Marx, I., Schuerman, N. (2016). Belgium, or How Inertia Can Have Unexpected Benefits in Times of Crisis. In: Schubert, K., de Villota, P., Kuhlmann, J. (eds) Challenges to European Welfare Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07680-5_3
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