Wellbeing and welfare regimes in four countries

This paper begins to link the earlier ‘Bath’ research into welfare regimes in developing countries with the WeD research into wellbeing in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand. It thus presents a qualitative comparative analysis of wellbeing across the four countries. The welfare regime model is modified in two main ways: to include satisfaction with important life goals as a measure of wellbeing outcomes, and to include comparative family and cultural structures as major explanations of welfare regimes. The second section summarises the global context shaping the four countries since 1990 and the combined and unequal reflection of these in the political economies of the four countries. The next four sections consider in turn: welfare and wellbeing outcomes, the ‘welfare mix’ (the ways states, markets, communities, households and their international equivalents interact to produce wellbeing or illbeing), some of the structural determinants of these, and political mobilisations to protect or change the regime pattern. It concludes by relating welfare regimes to the idea of wellbeing developed within the WeD programme.