Children Against Fathers? the Intergenerational Profile of Welfare Reforms in Italy and Spain

The original formulation of the Southern European model put emphasis on two main features (among others) of welfare arrangements along the Mediterranean rim: i) the old age protection bias, with (currently or prospectively) hypertrophic pension systems; ii) the underdevelopment of social assistance, especially the lack of an anti-poverty safety-net.

These features did not only contribute to the peculiar functional and distributive distortions of Southern European welfare states, they also had (have) major intergenerational implications.

Against such backdrop, the paper compares policy developments in the fields of pensions and social assistance both in Italy and Spain with three main aims. First, it asks to what extent two decades of welfare reforms have reduced (or, even sharpened) the intergenerational distortion. Second, it assesses whether the Euro crisis and the Great Recession have operated as catalysts for changing established distributional patterns of welfare reforms. Third, it interprets the different trajectories in Italy and Spain by stressing – in the shadow of increasingly powerful external constraints - the key role of domestic politics in shaping reform content along the intergenerational dimension.