The Welfare State and the Wage Relation

In Chapter 1 , we defined the welfare state as the result of a social compromise in the conflict concerning the distribution of one of the many creations of human society, in this case social protection. It should then become evident that the history of the welfare states of both the developed and underdeveloped countries is such a compromise that translates into what we call the wage relation. In this chapter, we will define the theoretical characteristics of how the different types of social protection systems we discussed in the previous chapters translate into different wage relations. We will then analyze the empirical correspondence based on expenditure, social protection coverage, and wage data.