Public and private social policy

The changing roles of, and the relationships between, public and private social benefits is one of the most important social policy issues of our time. Comparative research can offer unique insights into understanding the changing boundaries between public and private efforts to provide social benefits. Such awareness is especially crucial today, as pushes for market-based social policy are strengthening in a number of advanced industrial countries. This volume makes a major contribution to contemporary policy debates, offering a systematic analysis of the public-private dichotomy for social policy and covering four continents and two policy areas: health care and pensions. It provides a comparative analysis of major insights found in the recent social policy literature, and stresses the complex and changing nature of the public-private dichotomy.