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Examines the supposed threat to the future trajectory of social spending posed by population ageing. An initial focus is on the contrast between the sense of crisis characterizing popular and governmental accounts with the more measured analysis of demographers and economists. Later sections examine a variety of welfare state programmes for the old and show that expenditure trajectories are only marginallyinfluenced by demographic considerations, but that what really influences expenditure outcomes is the differential generosity of pension provision in different families of nations. Differential generosity is also shown to be a further factor influencing aggregate patterns of social expenditure.

This chapter looks at research devoted to demographic trends and their economic, political, and social implications, emphasising its significance as well as the interaction between demographic trends and global finance in Europe. It considers the recent comparative research on European pension systems, including the causes and consequences of early retirement for the fiscal health of the continent's social security systems. It argues that the principles of social solidarity remain very important in the European debate over national systems of retirement income and finance. It also raises questions about the proper role of markets in relation to social solidarity in regulating the provision of retirement income, noting the very different conceptions of risk allocation and risk management. Finally, the chapter discusses the Anglo-American model as an alternative to the past by offering a model of pension funding and economic development that has many desirable features given the growth of the new economy over the 1990s.

Like France and Italy, Germany will be severely affected by an ageing population and the underfunding of social insurance and related retirement benefits. While there is considerable pride in Otto von Bismarck's model of social solidarity and insurance, there is widespread debate about the proper response to the demographic crisis, including continuing conflict over the role and status of private pension privatisation. This chapter examines how and why financial transparency and comparability have become so significant, and the implications of such accountability for management power and private pension systems. The convergence of the United States, international, and European accounting standards is discussed, with emphasis on the underlying assumptions made by accounting professionals about the efficiency of global finance. The patterns of German corporate pension accounting in the DAX 30 index and non-DAX 30 companies are considered, along with pension liability and corporate finance, Germany's adoption of international accounting standards, corporate pension liabilities, and management discretion and retirement plans.

South Korea’s development experience is well known. This chapter shifts the focus away from not how Korea did it but what does it need to do after achieving economic and industrial prosperity, democracy, and social modernity. This chapter argues that new challenges come with prosperity, and while Korea can learn from the experience of other OECD countries, there are also problems that must be understood on Korea’s terms. Given the limits of the home market and demographic crisis, this chapter underscores the importance of engaging with Asia, the new global center for economic dynamism. The chapter identifies three propositions, which Korea must tackle: regional involvement, trade and FDI for market and resource access in Asia, and accommodating foreigners.

While the term “social investment” is hardly ever used in Japan, “investment in tomorrow” and “investment in people” have been repeatedly used to justify policy expansion for childcare and human resource development since the first decade of the 21st century. Although Japan is shifting its spending patterns, it is necessary to look into policy development and discourse in order to understand its qualitative features. This chapter argues that a stratified social investment was quietly diffused in Japan. Despite the expansion of social spending on the younger generation, stratification progressed due to the heavy reliance on private spending and indifference to universal access and redistribution. Government papers show that the typical reasoning behind social investment policies is missing. The protagonists of social investment in Japan were policymakers and bureaucrats concerned with a declining and aging population. Family policy was expanded to meet the needs of middle-class, dual-earner households. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party, however, was an antagonist since it relied on support from the religious right, which holds an anti-feminism ideology. Big business acted as both a protagonist and an antagonist: It is an ardent advocator of human resource development, but it is opposed to spending its resources on skill formation. Such a constellation of actors has shaped stratified social investment in Japan.

By contrast to the settler-dominated plain (Chapter 1), this chapter examines the long-term socio-economic development of the peasantry massed in the mountains of the Ouarsenis and Dahra. European occupation of the cereal lands in the plain cooped up the peasants on the poor, rocky soils of the interior where they faced a cycle of periodic drought and a ‘Malthusian’ crisis, in which small subsistence farmers faced deepening poverty and malnutrition. The peasants placed growing pressure on the resources of the forests from which they were excluded by draconian laws, commercial mines, and dam construction, leading to an environmental catastrophe and soil erosion. Apart from a degree of social banditry and forest ‘invasions’, the peasantry remained politically quiescent, but the characteristic pattern of dispersed settlement in isolated farmhouses meant that the large, joint family remained strong, a basis for future resistance.