cope with ongoing and future pressures. Our hypotheses is that Portugal is being particularly
affected by the effects of neo-liberal convergence and is failing to respond to
internal and external challenges adequately (e.g. without aggravating citizens living
standards and risks of poverty and social exclusion) due, namely, to unresolved structural
problems2
and the weaknesses of its institutions. These challenges represent severe
adjustment difficulties that are aggravated by a greater exposure to the intensification
of capital and goods’ flows and have major consequences for the employment
relationship and structure.
2. New challenges for a welfare state under (re)construction
Following the seminal work of Esping-Andersen published in 1990 The Three Worlds
of Welfare Capitalism, many studies have identified a variety of welfare regimes in democratic
industrial capitalist societies. Some of these studies added to the three welfare
regimes originally identified by Esping-Andersen to categorize advanced capitalist
societies - social-democratic, liberal, and conservative - a fourth type which they categorised
as “South European”, “Mediterranean” (Bonoli 1997: 149; Ferrera 1996; Guillen
and Matsaganis 2000) or “Latin Rim” (Leibfried 1992) model of welfare state, to
refer to South European Countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece3
. Our paper
is inspired in the theoretical proposal developed by Maurizio Ferrera and emphasizes
the idea that the Portuguese welfare state shares with some other southern
European countries identical institutional and political traits. Let us recall some of its
most important specificities.
The Portuguese welfare state is often characterized, along with other southern
European welfare states, by its late development, inequalities (e.g. segmented occupa-