The world politics of social investment: Volume II. Julian L.Garritzmann (Ed.), SiljaHäusermann (Ed.), BrunoPalier (Ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. £64 (hardback). <scp>ISBN</scp>: 9780197601457

The World Politics of Social Investment: Volume II (Garritzmann et al., 2022) brings together leading scholars to produce a comprehensive analysis of social investment reforms in a global perspective. Building on Volume I (Garritzmann et al., 2022) – which focussed on the explanatory variables – Volume II explores the interaction between the explanatory variables and the dependent variable: social investment strategies. In Chapter 1 the authors review two dimensions of social investment strategies: functions (skill creation, preservation, and mobilisation) and distributive profiles (inclusive, stratified, and targeted). These dimensions help to define and measure social investment, a concept which has been criticised for lacking a clear definition, and to facilitate comparisons drawn from the empirical chapters. The first chapters (Part I) illustrate that the Scandinavian countries continue to follow an inclusive strategy, even if this is showing cracks, and remain social investment exemplars (Chapter 2). In contrast, social investment is underdeveloped in the liberal welfare regimes of Canada and the US, with the former following a mixed stratified/targeted and the latter a targeted strategy (Chapter 6). The chapters in Part I - which also include Germany (Chapter 3) and southern Europe (Chapters 4 and 5) - emphasise that policy legacies, public opinion, partisan politics and fiscal stability contribute to divergent social investment strategies in Western Europe and North America. The chapters on Central and Eastern Europe (Part II) argue that social investment strategies depend on different growth strategies. In the Baltic countries, illustrated most clearly by Estonia, reforms have been designed to create human capital through investments in education to support the transition to high-skill, knowledge-based economies (Chapters 7 and 9). In contrast, the Visegrád four have opted for re-industrialisation and FDI led growth while favouring compensatory over social investment policies to satisfy the losers of economic transition (Chapters 8 and 9).The following chapters on North East Asia (Part III) highlight that both welfare state legacies and growth strategies have converged to produce welfare states with lean social protection, weakening the constraint of pre-exiting commitments and thus providing the fiscal space to expand social investment (Chapters 10–13). South Korea has gone furthest, particularly through investments in early childhood education and care (Chapter 13), with neighbouring countries more tentatively moving in the direction of social investment. Faced with aging societies and falling birth rates, policymakers in the region have turned to social investment as a solution to demographic challenges. Finally, the chapters on Latin America (Part IV) show that policy legacies may constrain the expansion of social investment (Chapter 14) and that the design and delivery of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) are influenced by the strength and ideology of political parties in government (Chapters 15 and 16). Common to these cases has been the use of CCTs as an instrument to reduce poverty and social exclusion – generally reflecting a targeted strategy. Throughout the empirical chapters subnational territories (regions and municipalities) emerge as important actors: in North America, Québec stands out in for its inclusive social investment strategy (Chapter 6); in Germany, reforms to tracking in secondary education have occurred at the Länder rather than the federal level (Chapter 3); in the Baltics, the fiscal and policy autonomy of municipalities contributes to divergence in the provision of early childhood education and care (Chapter 7) and in Latin America, CCTs frequently have their origins in programmes developed in subnational territories (Chapters 14 and 15). The findings suggest that subnational territories are more crucial to social investment than is recognised by the book's editors. The expansion of service-oriented social investment, in which responsibility for service provision is typically devolved or decentralised to subnational territories, calls into question the usefulness of countries (and global regions) as the unit of analysis and requires that future research better account for the territorial aspect of the welfare state. Overall, the theoretical framework which guides the empirical chapters is comprehensive and coherence is maintained throughout the book. In the conclusion, the editors convincingly synthesise the findings from the diverse empirical chapters to present a typology of welfare state reform strategies which helps us to make sense of social investment reform trends (Chapter 17). The World Politics of Social Investment: Volume II is essential reading for students and scholars of the welfare state.

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