Guest seminar

"Social development and welfare/gender regimes in OECD countries"

Social development can be defined, in the perspective of Amartya Sen, as "a set of processes leading to the improvement of the living conditions and potentials of individuals and collectivities". From this definition, one can derive a set of rules as to how social development should be measured, so that societies can be compared in time and among themselves in this respect. The author will briefly review various attempts at constructing indicators of social development, and new avenues to be explored in this respect. He will mainly focus on the contribution of welfare and gender regimes typologies to capturing the different ways in which developed societies have articulated the relationship between the main agencies involved in the production of welfare: markets, the State, and the family. This illustrates how these societies play out the subtle dialectics between the principles of liberty, equality, and solidarity.