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International research on the social determinants of health and health inequalities has increasingly begun to draw upon the comparative social policy literature. Specifically, research has concentrated on examining, and to some extent explaining, differences in health outcomes between and within developed countries by comparing different types of welfare state regimes and their respective politics and policies. 1 - 10 Recent calls for further analysis of the political nature of health (and indeed the creation of "political epidemiology") suggest that it is likely that such research will grow in the future. 11 12 However, public health research has to date relied extensively on the typology of welfare state regimes proposed by Esping-Andersen in his 1990 publication (which used 1980 data), The three worlds of welfare capitalism . 13 This is despite the fact that within the discipline of social policy, Esping-Andersen's typology has long been the subject of extensive scholarly criticism and there is in fact a number of competing welfare state typologies that may also be of use in public health research. 14 - 22 The purpose of this paper is to provide public health researchers and epidemiologists with an up-to-date overview of the social policy literature on welfare state regimes, so that our research can reflect and benefit from the more contemporaneous insights on offer from the "welfare modelling business". 20 21
This paper begins by summarising Esping-Andersen's seminal work, The three worlds of welfare capitalism ; it then presents the various criticisms that this theory received and outlines the resulting alternative welfare state typologies that emerged. It concludes by suggesting new avenues of study in public health that could be explored by drawing upon this broader welfare state regimes literature. Although there are existing reviews of welfare state regime theory, these are somewhat outdated and, perhaps more importantly, they were not written specifically for or publicised to a public health audience. 20 21
THE THREE WORLDS OF WELFARE
In The three worlds of welfare capitalism (1990), 13 Esping-Andersen presents a typology of 18 Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) welfare states based upon three principles: decommodification (the extent to which an individual's welfare is reliant upon the market, particularly in terms of pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness insurance), social stratification (the...