Denmark has just about 5.3 million people with 200,000 Muslim immigrants. The country is characterized by high economic growth and is relatively peaceful. Even foreigners enjoy benefit from the Danish welfare system on an equal footing with the Danes and much benefit from free public education and healthcare services. Metro trains – surface and underground – as well as public buses are the mode of public transport. The outdoors everywhere is decorated with carpets of lush green grass. The sidewalks and cycle lanes are equally impressive. The government seems to have huge concerns for children’s safety and physical fitness and have built children parks and playgrounds in every nook and corner of the city. When I went to a kindergarten called Himmelrumet with sweets on my son’s birthday, Mikhail, one of the teachers said: “Sweets are prohibited here, lest kids grow fatter and hyperactive.” More astounding is the percentage of population on cycles. “This is why Danes are healthy and live longer,” said Dorte Anderson. Though authentic data were not available, Anderson said half the people on the street ride bicycles. “Not long ago, even the prime ministers rode on a cycle here,” she added.
Denmark, a small country in the Nordic region of the European Union, has frequently been hailed as housing the world’s happiest people. Despite high taxation (up to 60 percent), the people remain happy with their government. It is also referred to as one of the world’s most decentralized welfare states and the best-performing European state in which the government accepts responsibility for ensuring that all its citizens receive a minimum income, and have access to the highest possible provision in the fields of healthcare, housing and personal social services. The country’s economic performance has marched hand-in-hand with social justice. And Denmark is not the only welfare state experiencing this. Even in capitalist societies, for instance the United States, where 47 million currently have no health insurance, President Obama is on a drive to healthcare reform, to provide socialized healthcare to all Americans.
It appears that the crisis of the welfare state and the questions about its sustainability is just rhetoric. Welfare states and welfare policies are unlikely to wane despite thriving market capitalism exacerbating inequalities in societies.
It thus appears that the crisis of the welfare state and the questions about its sustainability is just rhetoric. Welfare states and welfare policies are unlikely to wane despite thriving market capitalism exacerbating inequalities in societies. Denmark represents a state where the government’s role is high with no evidence of cuts in spending on social policies in the last two decades. The country has sustained its welfare institutions in robust conditions and has the highest rates of employment even during this time of recession. One of the hallmarks of such a successful welfare state is obviously the high-level of taxation without which public spending on healthcare and education would be impossible. The other seems to be highly decentralized, efficient and transparent governance mechanism with a view to provide quick services to the people combined with high morale and respect of people toward the government institutions and democracy. One of the journalists of a leading newspaper named “Politiken” cracked a joke: “Our chief editor is the only real opposition to the Danish government.” The government levies heavy taxes on the people but the people do not object as long as they get welfare measures. A Pakistani-origin driver who I met one morning on a public bus spoke to me in Hindi saying he draws 18,000 Danish kroner a month but pays 39 percent as taxes to the government. He said he was perfectly happy with the Danish welfare system.
Coming back to Nepal, one finds that people are deeply unhappy. Blindly borrowed Western concept of liberalization and free-market capitalism have insidious effects as schools without a playground or hospitals without equipment mushroom most notably in the capital Kathmandu. A dangerous trend toward commercialization of education and health has thus set in. While allowing such commercial enterprises to thrive, the statesmen and policymakers do not weigh results of such actions against its possible side-effects in the long term.
As the new political elites talk about tackling structural inequalities in the interest of the disadvantaged and are writing a new constitution to suit the highly-decentralized federal republic of Nepal, should debates on welfare escape the discussion? Is it possible, as we hear that rhetoric, to learn from those welfare states and devise a new policy for Nepal so that the values of a welfare state can be realized?
Beyond doubt, such a high level of public intervention in the form of public spending is unthinkable in Nepal. Yet, it is never too late to begin a basic level of public intervention necessary to prevent conflict and unrest in the future. To begin with, the simplest of public intervention that Nepal desperately needs are care institutions for children run and funded by the state, a provision of free and compulsory basic education and free medical insurance for the population.
Care of children is first among those public interventions the European welfare states have made possible in the post-war period. The rationale for this is to help mothers go to work and contribute to the family income. The much-touted slogan – women empowerment – will only prove to be a rhetoric in Nepal should millions of women remain confined to homes nurturing their children. Lessons from the welfare states suggest that childcare, including compulsory elementary education, and free medical insurance of the population could be realized with a progressive taxation policy. Conversely in Nepal, the 10,000-plus private schools are not paying even 1 percent service charge, let alone other taxes. Though public education (up to secondary) in Nepal is free, private education is not accessible to the poor. Education is one area where public intervention is necessary. East Asian states namely the eastern tigers – Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea – provide the clearest example of the developmental state using education in the pursuit of rapid state formation. The coincidence in these countries of rapid economic advance with educational expansion clearly suggests a close relationship between the two. Like present-day Nepal, Singapore, in the 1960s, was undergoing complex political, social and economic crises. It was a multicultural society torn by violent internal ethnic and religious strife. South Korea in the 1950s was economically depressed. Thanks to state-driven post-war reforms, they achieved miracles in less than two decades. The first and foremost thing they attempted was basic and primary education with the state at the helm of affairs.
Education and health are of fundamental importance to new Nepal and are crucial for societal well-being but they continue to remain out of reach for the teeming millions squirming below the poverty line. Education not only provides high-level of technical skills and knowledge, which future industry will need and which the state bureaucracy will rely for effective strategic planning, it also develops the attitudes and motivations in individuals that will ensure continuing collective commitment to and active participation in the goals of national development. So long as the basic social welfare provisions, most importantly education, do not remain state-driven, and the earning class and the rich businessmen continue to pay low taxes, this is unlikely to materialize in Nepal. In a nutshell, welfare of the people should remain at the heart of discussions in the ongoing constitution-making process for building a New Nepal, the purpose of which is to promote economic efficiency, reduce poverty, promote social equality and avoid exclusion, if at all the architects of New Nepal genuinely desire to transform the nation from what they call ‘feudalistic’ to modern democratic state.
nitya.n.timsina@gmail.com
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