The Social Investment Welfare Expenditure data set (SIWE): a new methodology for measuring the progress of social investment in EU welfare state budgets

The social investment perspective has become a reference framework for comparative welfare state analysis, and a powerful idea influencing the European social dimension since the Lisbon Strategy. A number of empirical studies in the field have focused on the budgetary side of welfare state change, tracking the dynamics of “new” social investment versus “old” social protection spending. Still, many data limitations (e.g. scarce country/years coverage) and the prevailing use of rough spending-over-the-GDP indicators have hindered the progress of our empirical knowledge over social investment in Europe. This working paper presents a new data set and methodology for the comparative analysis of welfare state budgets from the perspective of social investment. Based on various Eurostat data sources, the Social Investment Welfare Expenditure data set (SIWE) includes social spending data finely disaggregated into welfare functions for 29 countries (EU-28 less Croatia, plus Norway and Switzerland), and covers years from 1995 to 2013. Building on previous contributions, I develop a new methodology for measuring “budgetary welfare effort” (BWE), that is, the effort effectively put by governments on selected welfare programmes, net of the interferences due to economic and demographic oscillations. I also construct two composite BWE indices that allow to directly compare the whole social investment and social protection dimensions of welfare state budgets, in a way more accurate than what done so far. This provides researchers with a fresh tool for empirical analyses of the dynamics, causes and consequences of welfare state change from the perspective of social investment. The SIWE data set can be requested from the author’s web page.