| Abstract [eng] |
This paper examines the relationship between welfare indicators and economic growth in European countries in the period 2008 - 2018. The theoretical part of the work reviews the development of the welfare state in the context of social models, as well as examines the three main welfare regimes and the most widely used welfare assessment indices. According to the latest data and analysis of scientific literature it has been shown that in order to assess the welfare at the national level, it is appropriate to take account not only of the welfare aspects of the results, but also the efforts. In the practical part of the study, a composite welfare assessment index was constructed, covering the dimensions of health, education, inequality and resources (expenditure). The exploratory analysis of the data showed that the composite index and other indicators are heterogeneous across countries and over time, thus the application of panel models to this problem is substantiated. In order to identify the relationship between the welfare assessment index and economic growth in different groups of countries, firstly a cluster analysis was performed. Clustering of countries allowed to distinguish groups of Southern, Eastern and Central European countries, as well as identified a cluster of Northern and part of Western European countries with the largest resources and the smallest inequality. Clustering also helped to solve the problem of heterogeneity of model residuals. Regression analysis across clusters of European countries showed that GDP growth is not directly related to the composite welfare index, but a positive impact of employment on welfare has been identified in all groups except Southern European countries. Therefore there is ground to assume that welfare is linked to economic growth through employment: higher employment creates the assumptions for economic growth, which provide opportunities to improve the quality of public services. Meanwhile, the analysis of cluster volatility in terms of time helped to identify Lithuania's jump from group of Central to Eastern European countries, which is characterized by a higher level of social exclusion and a one third lower public expenditure than the European average. |
