Through the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives for the welfare state

The COVID-19 pandemic has put a strain on governments' ability to support the economy. Intervention was necessary to sustain families and businesses afflicted by the economic crisis. Welfare policies highlighted the differences among countries reflecting their welfare models. The decades before the pandemic had been characterised in most european economies by austerity and liberalisation policies. Among the consequences of these policies, in many countries access to welfare measures has become increasingly category-based - in some cases it happened alongside with a retrenchment of the welfare state - rather than universal. In this chapter, we reconstruct the stages of the reduction in welfare spending by the countries of the EU. We also discuss the reasons why a reversal of these policy would be desirable. In particular, we show that the pandemic has highlighted the problems of welfare systems most subject to spending cuts, which have had great difficulty in providing for the needs of workers left outside the social safety net. In the case study taken into consideration, that of Italy, it is shown that it is more difficult to guarantee the social rights of all citizens with a category-based welfare system, despite the measures undertaken by the government.