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Title: Three Regimes of Childcare: the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Gustafsson, Siv S. Stafford, Frank P. |
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Three Regimes of Childcare: the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden In: Social Protection Versus Economic Flexibility: Is There a Tradeoff? R. Blank, ed. Chicago, IL: NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1993. Also: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12659.ctl Cohort(s): Young Women Publisher: University of Chicago Press Keyword(s): Behavior; Child Care; Cross-national Analysis; Labor Force Participation; Manpower Planning; Sweden, Swedish; Welfare; Women Differences in social protection across countries have received far more attention as national economies have become more interconnected through trade and finance.In this paper we study the nature and functioning of childcare policies in Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States. These three countries, despite being at what might be regarded as similar levels of industrialization, have dramatically different regimes under which families secure childcare to facilitate labor market activity of young women. Perceived economic pressures and wage slowdowns in all three countries will undoubtedly shape the debate on the expansion or reduction of the public policy role in these and other areas of social protection. Our thesis is that to understand both the context and features of these specific programs one needs a broader framework to understand the historical and conceptual origins of the welfare concept in each country. The welfare concept, in turn, shapes the system of social protection and its modification in light of emerging economic forces. The basic descriptive differences in the use of public programs and market and informal arrangements which constitute the childcare subsystem of the larger social welfare system in the three countries are presented. We summarize some of the existing research findings on the use of the systems, and utilizing three separate microdata sets, one for each country, we provide some comparative differences in earnings growth and behavioral responses in terms of labor force participation and price sensitivity. Finally, we offer a summary and some conjectures on possible pressures to modify the systems and ways in which the systems might enhance or inhibit a country's position in the world economy. U.S. data used: Young Women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth as of 1988. |
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Bibliography Citation
Gustafsson, Siv S. and Frank P. Stafford. "Three Regimes of Childcare: the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden" In: Social Protection Versus Economic Flexibility: Is There a Tradeoff? R. Blank, ed. Chicago, IL: NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
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