Beschreibung
The consolidation of public finance has become the most prevalent topic in
recent policy discourse in the United States. However, the political
debate about fiscal „belt-tightening“ stretches back to the last decades
of the past millennium, induced by deteriorating economic conditions which
followed the first oil price shock in the early 1970s. In
Retrenchment in the American Welfare State, Martin Schuldes
investigates to what extent different welfare state programs in the United
States were affected by cutbacks during the Republican Reagan era on the
one hand and during the Democratic Clinton era on the other, to what
extent these cutbacks reveal certain „patterns“ of retrenchment and how
the measured discrepancies can best be explained.
Martin Schuldes studied Politics and Public Administration at the University
of Konstanz (Germany) and Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA). Since 1997,
he has been working for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation
and Development (BMZ), currently dealing with Afghanistan.
