'In this volume, Frank Castles and his team of experts continue the myth-busting process begun in Castles's 2004 analysis of welfare state crisis. Their combination of statistical sophistication and theoretical reflection on the political economy of public expenditure slices straight through the myriad misplaced assumptions regarding the decline of the state, globalization, 'races to the bottom' and welfare retrenchment. This book makes compulsory reading for all social scientists.'
- Martin Rhodes, University of Denver, US 'I like simple sentences, cross-country collaborations, great graphs, and compelling conclusions. Here, remarkably, we have a book with all four. This is vibrant writing on a topic -- the long reach of state spending -- that figures in everyone's lives. It is hard to know whether the book will be more gripping for the Prime Minister or for high-brow professors of economics and political science.'
- Andrew Oswald, University of Warwick, UK
While the prevailing orthodoxy of the expenditure retrenchment literature is that globalization and neo-liberal ideas are leading to a downsizing ofthe state, empirical research - basing its conclusions on patterns of welfare state spending - does not support such a view. This book brings a new perspective to bear by looking at what has been happening to other areas of the state's activity.
Edited by Francis G. Castles, a leading authority in the field, and bringing together an outstanding group of British, German and American scholars, it examines trends in non-social or 'core' spending on public administration, defense, public order, education, economic affairs and debt financing and in the regulatory ordering of the economic sphere.The book not only opens up new areas of comparative public policy research, but also demonstrates clearly that there have been real reductions in the reach of state in some areas, although patterns of causation are more complex and varied than generally presumed by the retrenchment literature.
The research findings reported in The Disappearing State? provide pivotal, relevant and challenging core material for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses in public and social policy, political economy and the sociology of the modern state.
Contributors: F.G. Castles, T.R. Cusack, N. Fraser, P. Norris, H. Obinger, R. Parry, M.G. Schmidt, N.A. Siegel, U. Wagschal, R. Zohlnhöfe
