Social Rights, the Welfare State and European Austerity

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines welfare policy reform in the 'age of austerity', as it has been called, and focuses particularly on the period around the global financial crisis of 2008. It explores and assesses the attempts to use public law rights to counter these austerity reforms. The book also contains a number of case studies of social rights and austerity in 'old' Europe. It discusses the benefits of an empirical perspective on the operations of the Welfare State. The book overviews the general impact of austerity on the economies of the five national case countries such as, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and United Kingdom, with the addition of Sweden. It then describe the actions that governments took in attempting to deal with the consequences of the financial crisis by implementing spending cuts and/or tax rises.