Social policy in Emerging Welfare States

The study of the Welfare States (WS) in emerging countries is becoming a relevant in the field of comparative politics. The assumption of the paper is that there is a process of WS building at a global scale in the XXI century and some countries have reached an institutional structure similar the ones of the mature WS. However, it is clear that there are big differences among countries when we compare them in a regional basis. The aim of the paper is to participate in the debate about characteristics and degree of development of social policy in the emerging WS of East Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, trying to understand the main challenges they face.