Book Review: Transforming the Dutch Welfare State: Social Risks and Corporatist Reform
| Date | 01 September 2012 |
| Author | Pekka Kosonen |
| Published date | 01 September 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/138826271201400307 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
Book Reviews
European Jour nal of Social Secu rity, Volume 14 (2012), No. 3 217
Also, some of the recommendations i n Chapter VII are rather vague, and di cult
to satisfy at the same time. e recommendations on the social sustainability
dimension are for wider accessibility/ coverage and higher pensions. At the same
time, the author recommends obtaining the nancial sustainability of the system.
While everyone would l ike to o er better social services to the elderly, doing so may
endanger the long-term sustainability of the system. Xhumari does not talk about
ways of balancing the t wo types of desiderata and thus the normative par t resembles
the promises of a politician du ring an electoral campaign.
Furthermore, the author treats the three countries in isolation from the pension
experiences of the rest of Europe. Before learning from each other’s mistakes, the
three Western Balkan countries could learn from the experiences of the other East
European countries who have implemented the World Bank recommended reforms
for longer. ere is a wide literature on pension reform in bot h Western and Eastern
Europe that is ig nored. e use of t heories on pension reform and empirical ndings
from the previous literature would help to generate more precise recommendations
about how to increase coverage and maintai n long-term sustainabil ity.
Finally, the book contains a large number of grammatical mistakes. One can
understand that the author’s rst language is not English, but it is still odd that so
many mistakes should not have been spotted.
Emanuel Emil Coman
Nu eld College
Universi ty of Oxford
Emanuel Emil Coman is a political scientist at Nu eld College, Oxford. He is the
author of a recent article on pension reform ‘Nationally De ned Contributions on
Private Accounts in Eastern Europe: A Reconsideration of a Consecrated Argument
on Pension Reform’, Comparative Political Studies, June 2011.
Mara A. Yerkes, Tran sforming the Dutch Welfare State: Social Risks and C orporatist
Reform, Bristol, Policy Press , 2011, 164 pp., ISBN 978–1–84742–963–6 ( hardcover)
In an interesting study of the Dutch welfare reforms, Mara Yerkes asks whether the
corporatist welfare st ate has the capacity to respond to changing and emergi ng social
risks. ese risks include disability, childcare and insu cient employability. A er
demonstrating that a succes sful transformation of the welfare state has t aken place in
the Netherlands, she g ives an a rmative answer.
e theoretical point of departure involves an attempt to combine two ways of
think ing: new institutionalism and t he analysis of old and new social ri sks. e latter
proves, in the end, to be rather problematic. In addition, there is actually a third
tradition involved − that of democratic (or social) corporatism. us, the issue boils
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