Conceptualizing and Measuring Social Investment

The chapter develops a typology of social investment that seeks to go beyond a conceptualization based on a mere dichotomy between ‘compensation’ and ‘investment’, by analysing these policies in terms of the kind of capital that is invested in the targeted population. Next, it discusses some of the conceptual limitations of the approach. A second part is dedicated to operationalizing the concept, focusing on the input side of the policy process. It discusses what one can and cannot do with social expenditure, by allocating the different policy branches that the OECD distinguishes in its Social Expenditure Database (SOCX) within the proposed typology. It concludes by discussing a series of methodological problems with regard to interpreting cross-national and longitudinal variation in spending patterns to qualify the observed changes.