The political economy of regulating for welfare: regulation preventing loss of access to basic services in the UK, Sweden the EU and Israel,
What does the state do to prevent consumers from losing access to basic services in the market due to financial hardship, and under what conditions will this occur? Bringing together the literature on regulatory governance and the welfare state, this paper compares
regulatory regimes preventing loss of access to services in the UK, Sweden and Israel, in housing credit, electricity and water, and to the electricity and housing credit sectors in the EU, from the early 1990’s to the 2010’s. The paper finds that regulation addressing this issue was introduced in all but the Swedish cases. This highlights the significance of the welfare state context in addressing these issues through regulation, as more residual welfare regimes are associated with more social protection through regulation.
Hanan Haber is a Lecturer in Public Management (Regulation) at King's Business School. He was previously an LSE fellow in public policy and administration and later a British Academy Post Doctoral Fellow at the department of Government at the London School of Economics. His PhD is from the Hebrew University.
His research interests lie in the connection between social and regulatory policy from a comparative perspective.