South European welfare regime model and the turkish case

The rise of neoliberalism and the experience of several economic crises throughout 1960’s and 70’s have opened the way to question the ability of welfare state to satisfy the basic needs of the societies. Therefore the term “welfare state” left its place to “welfare regime” in which the responsibilities for the well being of the societies are distributed among state, market and families. Following the introduction of this new term, several typologies of welfare regimes are started to be discussed. Esping-Andersen’s (1990) regime typology is considered to be one of the most significant one which covers most of the European countries. On the other hand, it has also led to criticisms for being lack of several aspects. One of them was done by Ferrera (1996), Moreno (2001), Boboli (1997) and Liebfreid (1992), which discusses that the grouping of Mediterranean countries of Europe -Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal- within the conservative regime type. Those authors affirm that Southern European countries have their peculiar features in terms of structure of welfare provision and they form a fourth type which may be called "Mediterranean/ Southern European Regime". At this point, this doctoral thesis carries the discussion one step further and covers a profound research to answer some fundamental questions. Chiefly, clarifying whether it is possible to talk about a coherent grouping between the Mediterranean countries of Southern Europe in terms of their welfare regimes is our first objective. Then by assuming that it has an affirmative response, it is aimed to reflect the characteristics of this grouping. On the other hand, those group features are not static in time and they are sensible to various economic changes...

Discovering complex interrelationships between socioeconomic status and health in Europe: A case study applying Bayesian Networks

Studies assume that socioeconomic status determines individuals’ states of health, but how does health determine socioeconomic status? And how does this association vary depending on contextual differences? To answer this question, our study uses an additive Bayesian Networks model to explain the interrelationships between health and socioeconomic determinants using complex and messy data. This model has been used to find the most probable structure in a network to describe the interdependence of these factors in five European welfare state regimes. The advantage of this study is that it offers a specific picture to describe the complex interrelationship between socioeconomic determinants and health, producing a network that is controlled by socio demographic factors such as gender and age. The present work provides a general framework to describe and understand the complex association between socioeconomic determinants and health.