Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T00:12:53.336Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Fiscal Side of Social Policy: State Building, Payroll Contributions, and Pension Reform in 1960s Canada

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2017

Daniel Béland
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan
Michal Koreh
Affiliation:
University of Haifa

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The authors thank Tanya Andrusieczko, Pierre-Marc Daigneault, Rachel Hatcher, Christopher Howard, Olivier Jacques, Kimberly Morgan, John Myles, and the anonymous reviewers of JPH for their comments on previous drafts of this article. Daniel Béland also acknowledges support from the Canada Research Chairs Program.

References

NOTES

1. Martin, Isaac William, Mehrotra, Ajay K., and Prasad, Monica, “The Thunder of History: The Origins and Development of New Sociology,” in The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in a Comparative and Historical Perspective, ed. Martin, Isaac William, Mehrotra, Ajay K., and Prasad, Monica (Cambridge, 2009), 128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Koreh, Michal and Béland, Daniel, “Reconsidering the Fiscal-Social Policy Nexus: The Case of Social Insurance,” Policy & Politics 45, no. 2 (2017): 271–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Koreh, Michal and Shalev, Michael, “Dialectics of Institutional Change: The Transformation of Social Insurance Financing in Israel,” Socio-Economic Review 7, no. 7 (2009): 553–84Google Scholar.

3. Campbell, John L., Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton, 2004).Google Scholar

4. Michal Koreh, “The Political Economy of Social Insurance Financing: A Fiscal-Centered Approach to Welfare State Development” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 2011).

5. See, for example, Titmuss, Richard, “The Social Division of Welfare,” in Essays on “The Welfare State,” 2nd ed. (London, 1963), 3455Google Scholar; Cedric, C. Sandford, Thomas, Pond, Chris, and Walker, Robert L., Taxation and Social Policy (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Cass, Bettina, Taxation and Social Policy (Sydney, 1983)Google Scholar; Kvist, Jon and Sinfield, Adrian, Comparing Tax Routes in Denmark and the United Kingdom (Copenhagen, 1996)Google Scholar; Steinmo, Sven, Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British, and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State (New Haven, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blyth, Mark, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Palier, Bruno, Gouverner la sécurité sociale (Paris, 2002)Google Scholar; Wilensky, Harold L., Rich Democracies: Political Economy, Public Policy, and Performance (Berkeley, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kato, Junko, Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State: Path Dependence and Policy Diffusion (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Andrea Louise and Morgan, Kimberly J., “Financing the Welfare State: Elite Politics and the Decline of the Social Insurance Model in America,” Studies in American Political Development 19 (Fall 2005): 173–95Google Scholar; Koreh, and Shalev, , “Dialectics of Institutional Change”; Monica Prasad and Yingying Deng, “Taxation and the Worlds of Welfare,” Socio-Economic Review 7, no. 3 (2009): 431–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steinmo, Sven, The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar; Koreh, The Political Economy of Social Insurance Financing.

6. Kvist and Sinfield, Comparing Tax Routes; Alcock, Pete, Glennerster, Howard, Oakley, Ann, and Sinfield, Adrian, eds., Welfare and Well-Being: Richard Titmuss’s Contribution to Social Policy (Bristol, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reisman, David, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. For an overview, see Wilensky, Rich Democracies; Kato, Regressive Taxation; Prasad and Deng, “Taxation and the Worlds of Welfare,” 431–33.

9. Hacker, Jacob, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Hacker, , “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Welfare State Retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 243–60Google Scholar; Howard, Christopher, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howard, , The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy (Princeton, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howard, , “Making Taxes the Life of the Party,” in The New Fiscal Sociology, ed. Martin, Mehrotra, and Prasad, (Cambridge, 2009), 86100.Google Scholar

10. Kvist and Sinfield, Comparing Tax Routes

11. Myles, John and Pierson, Paul, “Friedman’s Revenge: The Reform of ‘Liberal’ Welfare States in Canada and the United States,” Politics & Society 25 (1997): 443–72.Google Scholar

12. OECD, “Revenue Statistics Tax Structures, Table 6, Tax Revenue of Main Headings as Percentage of Total Taxation,” 2009, at http://www.oecd.org/ctp/taxpolicyanalysis/revenuestatisticstaxstructures.htm.

13. Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy; Campbell and Morgan, “Financing the Welfare”; Martin, Mehrotra, and Prasad, “The Thunder of History.”

14. Shalev, Michael, “The Social Democratic Model and Beyond: Two Generations of Comparative Research on the Welfare State,” Comparative Social Research 6, no. 3 (1983): 315551Google Scholar; Esping-Andersen, Gøsta and Korpi, Walter, “From Poor Relief to Institutional Welfare States: The Development of Scandinavian Social Policy,” International Journal of Sociology 16, nos. 3/4 (1986): 3974;Google Scholar Korpi, Walter, “Power, Politics, and State Autonomy in the Development of Social Citizenship: Social Rights During Sickness in Eighteen OECD Countries Since 1930,” American Sociological Review 54, no. 3 (1989): 309–28Google Scholar.

15. Swenson, Peter, “Bringing Capital Back In, or Social Democracy Reconsidered: Employer Power, Cross-Class Alliances, and Centralization of Industrial Relations in Denmark and Sweden,” World Politics 43, no. 4 (1991): 513–44Google Scholar; Hall, Peter A. and Soskice, David, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Estévez-Abe, Margarita, “The Forgotten Link: The Financial Regulation of Japanese Pension Funds in Comparative Perspective,” in Comparing Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy and Political Economy in Europe, Japan, and the USA, ed. Bernard Ebbinghaus and Philip Manow (New York, 2001), 190216Google Scholar.

16. Heclo, Hugh, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to Income Maintenance (New Haven, 1974)Google Scholar; Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda and Amenta, Edwin, “States and Social Policies,” Annual Review of Sociology 12, no. 1 (1986): 131–57Google Scholar.

17. Estévez-Abe, “The Forgotten Link.”

18. Musgrave, Richard Abel and Musgrave, Peggy B., Public Finance in Theory and Practice (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Barkai, Haim, The Evolution of Israel’s Social Security System: Structure, Time Pattern, and Macroeconomic Impact (Aldershot, Hants, 1998)Google Scholar; Cichon, Michael, Scholz, Wolfgang, De Meerendonk, Arthur Van, Hagemejer, Krzysztof, and Bertranou, Fabio, Financing Social Protection (Geneva, 2004)Google Scholar. The relationship between economic policy and welfare state development is a key topic in the social policy literature, including in historically minded scholarship. For example, see Peng, Ito and Wong, Joseph, “Institutions and Institutional Purpose: Continuity and Change in East Asian Social Policy,” Politics & Society 36, no. 1 (2008): 6188Google Scholar.

19. Ibid.

20. Schumpeter, Joseph A., “The Crisis of the Tax State,” International Economic Papers 4, no. 7 (1954): 538Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Rueschmeyer, and Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985), 161–91Google Scholar; Levi, Margaret, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar.

21. Martin, Mehrotra, and Prasad, “The Thunder of History.”

22. Alstott, Anne L., “Tax Policy and Feminism: Competing Goals and Institutional Choices,” Columbia Law Review 96, no. 8 (2006): 2001–82Google Scholar; Staudt, Nancy C., “Taxing Housework,” Georgetown Law Journal 85 (1996): 15711646Google Scholar; Kwass, Michael, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, égalité, fiscalité (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar.

23. Howard, The Hidden Welfare State; Hacker, Jacob S. and Pierson, Paul, “Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State,” Politics and Society 30, no. 2 (2002): 277325Google Scholar; Hacker, “Privatizing Risk”; Prasad and Deng, “Taxation and the Worlds of Welfare.”

24. Musgrave and Musgrave, Public Finance in Theory and Practice; Estévez-Abe, “The Forgotten Link”; Philip Manow, “Social Protection, Capitalist Production: The Bismarckian Welfare State and the German Political Economy from the 1880s to the 1990s” (Ph.D. diss., Konstanz University, 2001); Niemela, Heikki and Salminen, Kari, Social Security in Finland (Helsinki, 2006)Google Scholar; Kangas, Olli E., “Pensions and Pension Funds in the Making of a Nation-State and a National Economy: The Case of Finland,” in Financing Social Policy: Mobilizing Resources for Social Development, ed. Hujo, Katja and McClanahan, Shea (New York, 2009), 246–63Google Scholar; Park, Gene, Spending Without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan (Palo Alto, 2011)Google Scholar.

25. For example, Bryden, Kenneth, Old Age Pensions and Policy-Making in Canada (Toronto, 1974)Google Scholar; Simeon, Richard, Federal-Provincial Diplomacy: The Making of Recent Policy in Canada (Toronto, 2006 [1972])Google Scholar. For a partial (comparative but not fiscal-centered) exception, see Jacobs, Alan M., Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment (Cambridge, 2011), 139–42Google Scholar.

26. Leman, Christopher, “Patterns of Policy Development: Social Security in the United States and Canada,” Public Policy 25 (1977): 261–91Google Scholar; Orloff, Ann Shola, The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880–1940 (Madison, 1993)Google Scholar.

27. Pierson, Paul, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar.

28. Béland, Daniel and Myles, John, “Stasis Amidst Change: Canadian Pension Reform in an Age of Retrenchment,” in Ageing and Pension Reform Around the World, ed. Bonoli, Guiliano and Shinkawa, Toshimitsu (Cheltenham, 2005), 252–72Google Scholar. On layering, see Hacker, “Privatizing Risk.”

29. Wiseman, Michael and Yčas, Martynas, “The Canadian Safety Net for the Elderly,” Social Security Bulletin 68, no. 2 (2008): 5367Google Scholar.

30. Leff, Mark H., “Taxing the ‘Forgotten Man’: The Politics of Social Security Finance in the New Deal,” Journal of American History 70, no. 2 (1983): 359–79Google Scholar.

31. Bryden, Old Age Pensions and Policy-Making in Canada.

32. Ibid., 123.

33. Leff, “Taxing the ‘Forgotten Man.’”

34. Babich, Kristina and Béland, Daniel, “Policy Change and the Politics of Ideas: The Emergence of the Canada/Quebec Pension Plans,” Canadian Review of Sociology 46, no. 3 (2009): 253–71Google Scholar.

35. Banting, Keith G., “Canada: Nation-Building in a Federal Welfare State,” in Federalism and the Welfare State: New World and European Experiences, ed. Obinger, Herbert, Leibfried, Stephan, and Castles, Francis G. (Cambridge, 2005), 80137Google Scholar. See also Banting, Keith G., “Institutional Conservatism: Federalism and Pension Reform,” in Canadian Social Welfare Policy: Federal and Provincial Dimensions, ed. Ismael, Jacqueline (McGill-Queens 1985), 4874Google Scholar.

36. Bryden, Old Age Pensions, 124.

37. Béland, Daniel and Lecours, André, Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar.

38. Thompson, Dale, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution (Toronto, 1984)Google Scholar.

39. Courchene, Thomas J., Equalization Payments: Past, Present, and Future (Toronto, 1984)Google Scholar.

40. Thompson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution.

41. See, e.g., Brooks, Stephen and Brian Tanguay, A., “Quebec’s Caisse de Depot et Placement: Tool of Nationalism?” Canadian Public Administration 28 (1985): 99119Google Scholar; Rouzier, Ralph, La Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, Portrait d’une institution d’intérêt général, 1965–2000 (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar.

42. Thompson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution.

43. Babich and Béland, “Policy Change and the Politics of Ideas.”

44. Bryden, Penny, Planners and Politicians: Liberal Politics and Social Policy, 1957–1968 (Montreal, 1997)Google Scholar.

45. Babich and Béland, “Policy Change and the Politics of Ideas.”

46. Extremely intense in the mid-1960s, this type of discussion between Ottawa and the provinces was famously described by political scientist Richard Simeon as “federal-provincial diplomacy” in a classic 1972 book that used this expression as its very title: Simeon, Federal-Provincial Diplomacy.

47. Jacobs, Governing for the Long Term, 139–42.

48. Thompson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution, 188.

49. Jacobs, Governing for the Long Term, 144.

50. On the development of economic nationalism in Quebec, see Bourque, Gilles L., Le modèle québécois de développement: De l’émergence au renouvellement (Montreal, 2000)Google Scholar.

51. Bryden, Old Age Pensions.

52. Babich and Béland, “Policy Change and the Politics of Ideas.”

53. Brooks and Tanguay, “Quebec’s Caisse de Depot et Placement”; Rouzier, Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec.

54. Kent Weaver, R., Whose Money Is It Anyhow? Governance and Social Investment in Collective Investment Funds, Working Paper #2003-07, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Boston, 2003, 7Google Scholar.

55. For an overview of the contemporary demographic challenges facing Quebec, see Marier, Patrik, ed., Le vieillissement de la population et les politiques publiques: Enjeux d’ici et d’ailleurs (Quebec City, 2012)Google Scholar. For a critical discussion of the financial returns of the Caisse de dépôt over time, see Hanin, Frédéric, La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec à l’ épreuve de la financiarisation (Quebec City, 2016)Google Scholar.

56. Little, Bruce, Fixing the Future: How Canada’s Usually Fractious Governments Worked Together to Rescue the Canada Pension Plan (Toronto, 2008)Google Scholar.

57. Tamagno, Edward, A Tale of Two Pension Plans: The Differing Fortunes of the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans (Ottawa, 2008)Google Scholar; Béland, Daniel, “The Politics of the Canada Pension Plan: Private Pensions and Federal-Provincial Parallelism,” in How Ottawa Spends, 2013–2014—The Harper Government: Mid-Term Blues and Long-Term Plans, ed. Bruce Doern, G. and Stoney, Christopher (Montreal, 2013), 7687Google Scholar.

58. Government, Quebec, A Stronger Retirement Income System: Meeting the Expectations of Quebecers of Every Generation (Quebec City, 2011)Google Scholar. As for the gradual increase of the CPP replacement rate from 25 to 33.3 percent Ottawa and most of the provinces agreed upon in June 2016, as this article goes to print, it is not certain yet whether the Quebec government plans to replicate it for QPP.

59. Koreh, “The Political Economy of Social Insurance.”

60. Kangas, “Pensions and Pension Funds in the Making of a Nation-State and a National Economy,” 246–63; Niemela and Salminen, Social Security in Finland.

61. Pontusson, Jonas, The Limits of Social Democracy: Investment Politics in Sweden (Ithaca, 1992)Google Scholar.

62. Estevez-Abe, “The Forgotten Link,”190–216; Gene Park, Spending Without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan (Stanford, 2011).

63. Manow, Social Protection, Capitalist Production.

64. Kangas, “Pensions and Pension Funds in the Making of a Nation-State and a National Economy.”

65. Doron, Abraham, The Struggle over National Insurance in Israel, 1948–1953, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem, 1975)Google Scholar.

66. Koreh, Michal, “The Political Economy of Social Insurance: Towards a Fiscal-Centered Framework,” Social Policy & Administration 51, no. 1 (2017): 114–32Google Scholar, at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spol.12187/full.