State-led financialization of social care: variegation and regulatory mechanisms in Spain

The social reproduction crisis is intensifying pressure on state institutions to provide affordable social care, even as welfare-state development increasingly unfolds through variegated neoliberalisation, including financialization. While the state-led financialization of social care infrastructure has been analyzed in liberal and continental welfare systems, its magnitude and mechanisms remain underexplored in Southern European contexts, traditionally characterized by familialist, residual, and outsourced social care provision. This article addresses this gap by examining the residential care sector in Spain in recent decades, with a focus on Catalonia. It shows that the universalization of long-term care as a social right has fostered rather than constrained financialization: Rights expansion has coincided with, and enabled, rising ownership concentration among large for-profit providers and international asset managers extracting high profits from the sector. Drawing on documentary, statistical, and interview evidence, the article argues that this concentration is driven by state-led financialization operating through four mechanisms: budget austerity; standardization, service size growth, and financial requirements; a procurement regime that disregards quality-of-care outcomes; and the reproduction of care-work precarity as a source of profit. By bridging social policy and political economy research, the article shows that the state is not a bystander to the financialization of social reproduction but a central institution.