Bienestar que produce al adulto mayor ser parte de las

The lack of significant and systematic social expenditure retreat demonstrated above is broadly consistent with research that examines welfare state reform

23 _{Faced with intense political pressures during 2002-2003, the Pact with the November}

processes in cases with severe budgetary disequilibria during the early 1990s and EMU’s impact on them (see Featherstone, Kazamias and Papadimitriou 2001 on Greece; Ferrera and Gualmini 2000, and Radaelli 2002 on Italy; Hemerijck, Unger and Visser 2000 on Belgium). To be sure, this case-study literature tends to emphasize the sheer variety of actors, institutional settings, historical trajectories, and policy styles in the EMU candidates. Thus politics of welfare reform involved: addressing diverse problems with varying urgency; targeting different programs within diverse welfare regimes crystallizing around dissimilar historical-structural features, organizational characteristics, and policy styles; co- opting, giving side payments as quid pro quos to different societal actors, or acquiescing to their demands within different institutional contexts of interest intermediation; and appeasing or capitalizing on varying levels of public support for the European unification project. In short, all this means is that “varieties of welfare capitalism” implied “varieties of reform politics”. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, for all their variety there are some remarkable similarities between these cases which go a long way in explaining the results reported in this paper. All governments that came to power in the 1990s – where ever they were, or what ever political coloring they bore – intended to reform their welfare states. In domestic public debates welfare programs were commonly indicted as the main culprit for the severe financial problems that could forestall EMU entry.24 Successive attempts at welfare reform were continuously justified by reference to the very constraints EMU criteria pose. In the area of fiscal policy and politics, structural pressures and discursive opportunities of EMU appear to have led governments to institute some “Copernican revolutions” in some cases. Eventually the 1990s witnessed a phenomenal convergence with respect to the level of budgetary deficits enabling EMU-candidates passing the Maastricht test eventually.

Despite all these radical changes in fiscal behavior, when governments attempted to reform welfare programs their reform capacities in this field were in large part effectively demarcated by an alliance of entrenched interests. The convergence period is marred with successive episodes of mass mobilization of unions against pension reforms which ended up being diluted at best. Opposition parties (or even partners making up ruling coalitions) reined back governments

24 _{With its deadlines looming large, monetary integration, of course, was not the only spur}

to the reform processes. Several other factors have indeed come into play including specific problems of adjustment, financial sustainability, labor-market and post- industrial adaptability, susceptibility to national social conflict. Even without the Maastricht conundrum reforms in several areas (especially pensions) would have been part of the political agenda.

from pushing forward with far-reaching reform or by completely blocking cutbacks in social protection. Middle classes took to the streets in protest against reform plans to scale down (mostly) pension programs in order to meet the fiscal criteria. In some cases reform initiatives in the realm of social protection were shelved and proposals never saw the light of day. In others, governments ambitions were scaled down and the results of these reforms turned out to be much more modest than had originally been planned.

Notwithstanding the sheer difficulty of reforming the welfare state, some of the reforms were passed which could in fact be considered as retrenchment. These were carried out, however, almost always within a consensual context resulting in negotiation of new social pacts with organized actors. More often than not, the trade-off faced by reformers in most of these cases was to either scrap the proposals or to postpone their impact to later decades falling well beyond the Maastricht time horizon.25 Thus although EMU with its most impending strictures was expected to have immediately called for a major overhaul of welfare programs, almost all of these attempts stumbled on the politics of welfare reform to have resulted in only piecemeal, incremental retrenchment.

Underlying these developments was the fact that although rule-based EMU exerted immediate fiscal pressures, there was nothing in its structure that specified the strategy for correcting the existing fiscal imbalances. Evidence from processes of fiscal consolidation and welfare reform of the 1990s indicate that even in most problematic cases welfare states remained as generous as they were at the onset of the transition phase.26 Such empirical landscape, therefore, rests far from confirming the expectations of the conventional wisdom – that the burden of fiscal adjustment for fitting into the Maastricht straitjacket would fall onto social welfare budgets eventually compromising Europe’s welfare states. Members of the Eurozone, however, found alternative ways to deal with fiscal austerity while sustaining their social protection levels.27 To the extent that deficit reductions

25 _{For reasons of space, it is beyond the scope of the present paper to identify specific}

policy changes in each of these countries. For details, see the case studies referred to above.

26 _{See also Jenson and Pochet (2002) and Rhodes (2002) who reach similar conclusions.} 27 _{Fiscal politics of the 1990s has reconfirmed the view that convergence in fiscal}

outcomes (level of deficits and debt) do not necessarily presuppose convergence in fiscal policies. In this context, the “Maastricht effect” had its own limits. While 1990s saw efforts at genuine consolidation, EMU-candidates have devised different strategies to deal with the fiscal pressures emanating from EMU. In addition to cutting back public expenditures, among the strategies pursued were increasing public revenues including raising taxes and one-off measures (McNamara 2003) and some accounting tricks which were facilitated by the EUROSTAT (Savage 2001: 50). A degree of

were realized through curtailing total outlays, these reductions mainly centered on

non-social expenditures with a de-emphasis on industrial policy, reduced subsidies, declining defense expenditures, and declining spending on other items such as general public services leaving considerable leeway for welfare state- related portfolios (Castles 2004). Thus, although European welfare states underwent some re-adjustment some of which resulted in cutbacks (mainly with medium- and long term consequences), we do not observe the dismantling of European welfare states as a result of EMU expected by both Euro-skeptics and Euro-philes.

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How would a future NAMU impact the Canadian welfare state, and in this regard, what could the EMU experience tell us? This section addresses these questions by putting the issue of social consequences of NAMU into comparative perspective. It is highly likely that this issue will spark a lively debate alongside other contested issues if and when the political initiative is taken for a currency union. The incipient debate at least among the ranks of academia surveyed below is a sign in this respect.