The temporal welfare state: The case of Finland

Robert E. Goodin*, Antti Parpo, Olli Kangas

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    19 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. One way of bringing those contributions under a common metric is in terms of 'temporal autonomy': the freedom to spend one's time as one will, outside the necessities of daily life. Using the 1999-2000 Finnish Time Use Survey, we propose ways of operationalising the time that is 'strictly necessary' to spend in paid labour, unpaid household labour and personal care; the residual, 'discretionary time', represents people's temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on that of Finnish taxes, transfers and child care subsidies. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of Finland's Nordic welfare regime and of its female-friendly gender regime, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of people's daily lives.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)531-552
    Number of pages22
    JournalJournal of Social Policy
    Volume33
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Oct 2004

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