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 Greece.