Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial - Presidente da ...

of «market services». Most of the continental European countries displayan organisation of these community, social and personal serviceswhich appears somehow a mix of the two schemes. These organisationsstem from the various types of welfare systems developed in differentEuropean countries. As the characteristics of these systems mainlydepend on the relative role given to the family, the public sector orthe market in the provision of basic care and as one should not expectrapid changes in the hierarchy of values which are rooting the overallorganisation of social and personal services in each country, it can bechanged only in an incremental way 6 . This explains that most continentalEuropean countries did experience mass unemployment despitetheir past commitment to full employment and only slowly adjustedtheir pattern of service provision. Yet the experience of the US doesshow how incremental moves may end up with a widely transformedsystem of income transfer. It has not been noticed sufficiently whenassessing the US experience that their welfare system has been remarkablytransformed. The cuts in welfare of the 70’s and 80’s did forcemore people to work (an extraordinary rise in participation rates) andled to a rise in wage and earning inequality and in the number of workingpoor. This pressure has finally been countered in the 90’s with theimplementation of various negative income tax mechanisms, rising thefederal spending on low income families (not on welfare) from 6 billionsin 1984 to 52 billions in 1999.It is my strong contention that a deeper change of the nexus ofsocial and personal services is also needed in Europe, which wouldtake advantage of the new technologies and of the vast amount of«codified» knowledge accumulated, what could be called «cognitiveKeynesianism». It raises fundamental issues with respect to the organisationof Europe’s innovation system, presently too dichotomised andfragmented accross national frontiers and priorities. At the same timethe changes in health systems, in education as well as in leisure andwork organisation that are likely to emerge will affect strongly howpeople spend their time all along their life cycle. Moreover the directionof the changes will clearly be influenced by the specific demographicconditions of each country. It could lead to extensiveDebates3 0 8Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial