This article describes an overview of key findings from the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Project (CWEP). CWEP compiles major features of the generosity of unemployment, sickness and public pension programs over the last several decades in 21 countries. Describing and extending earlier work to measure the institutional variation in major social insurance programs over time, we provide previously unpublished methodological details of widely used measures of program generosity; measures which have appeared in over 200 analyses during the last decade and a half. We find a high level of variation in wage replacement and benefit conditionality across programs in most countries; calling into question the notion of an historically stable configurations of characteristics, at least during the last 45 years. For instance, our research shows that several prototypical social democratic welfare states experienced the highest declines in generosity in the last three decades. Furthermore, we also show that, as late as the mid-1970s, some ‘social democratic’ welfare states still trailed some ‘conservative’ welfare states, including prototypical ones like Germany.

中文翻译：

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五十年的福利国家慷慨

本文概述了比较福利权利项目 (CWEP) 的主要发现。CWEP 汇编了过去几十年在 21 个国家/地区的失业、疾病和公共养老金计划慷慨的主要特征。描述和扩展早期工作以衡量随着时间的推移主要社会保险计划的制度变化，我们提供了以前未发表的广泛使用的计划慷慨措施的方法细节；在过去 15 年中出现在 200 多项分析中的措施。我们发现大多数国家的计划中工资替代和福利条件存在很大差异；至少在过去的 45 年里，对历史上稳定的特征配置的概念提出了质疑。例如，我们的研究表明，几个典型的社会民主福利国家在过去三年中经历了慷慨程度的最大下降。此外，我们还表明，直到 1970 年代中期，一些“社会民主”福利国家仍然落后于一些“保守”福利国家，包括像德国这样的典型福利国家。