This paper addresses the question of how service delivery (SD) affects state legitimacy (SL) and conflict (C) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, drawing particularly on frameworks that move beyond a state-centric approach. Focusing on the majority-Arab countries of MENA, the paper aims to: (1) offer a preliminary explanation of the distinctiveness of this region in light of some of the main findings of the introductory paper by the lead guest editor Timo Kivimäki and (2) explore the potential of a social policy perspective in explaining the relationship between SD, SL and C. This is achieved by combining research insights acquired through extensive qualitative social policy research in the MENA region with a re-reading of the existing literature on SD, SL and C. To support a comprehensive re-examination of the issues at hand, the paper also draws on the 5th Wave of the Arab Barometer micro-level survey (ABS) on Arab citizen perceptions of socio-economic conditions in their countries and macro-level social welfare expenditure data from the World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI). By bringing insights from the social policy literature on the MENA region into conversation with broader research on the relationship between SD, SL and C, we identify several distinctive features of service delivery in the MENA context and examine their implications for state legitimacy and conflict.

State legitimacy and effectiveness can be observed in the state’s approach to delivering welfare to citizens, thus mitigating social grievances and avoiding conflicts. Social security systems in the Maghreb countries are relatively similar in their architecture and aim to provide social insurance to all the workers in the labor market. However, they suffer from the same main problem: a low rate of enrollment of workers. Many workers (employees and self-employed) work informally without any social security coverage. The issue of whether informal jobs are chosen voluntarily by workers or as a strategy of last resort is controversial. Many authors recognize that the informal sector is heterogeneous and assume that it is made up of (1) workers who voluntarily choose it, and (2) others who are pushed into it because of entry barriers to the formal sector. The former assumption tells us much about state legitimacy/attractiveness, and the latter is used to inform state effectiveness in delivering welfare. Using the Sahwa survey and discrete choice models, this article confirms the heterogeneity of the informal labor market in three Maghreb countries: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Furthermore, this article highlights the profiles of workers who voluntarily choose informality, an aspect that is missing from previous studies. Finally, this article proposes policy recommendations in order to extend social security to informal workers and to include them in the formal labor market.

In this study, we challenge the problem of inadequate voluntary pension savings by exploring the micro-dataset of the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) for three countries: Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. The existing empirical literature usually focuses on the role of socio-demographic factors to understand this phenomenon, and theoretical studies additionally highlight the role of behavioural factors. However, empirical studies in this field are extremely scarce. The use of the LWS data enables us to fill this research gap. Separately for each country, we verify the role of individuals' risk attitudes and intertemporal choices in the demand for voluntary pension savings. To make the results more robust, we add a set of socio-demographic control variables to our regressions. Our findings clearly reveal that being more risk averse and being less forward looking negatively affect people's propensity to save for retirement. Furthermore, we confirm that age, gender and education are significant predictors of pension demand in each of the analysed countries. We argue that these conclusions have practical meaning to improve regulatory frameworks.

State legitimacy and effectiveness could be seen by the way to deliver welfare to citizens to mitigate social grievances, that could eventually lead to conflicts (Kivimäki, 2021). Social security systems in Maghreb countries are quite similar in their architecture and aims to provide social insurance to all the workers in the labor market. However, they suffer from the same main problem: the low rate of enrollment of workers. Many workers (employees and self-employed) work informally without any social security coverage. The issue of whether informal jobs are chosen voluntarily by workers or as a strategy of last resort is controversial. Many authors recognize that the informal sector is heterogeneous and it is made up of workers who voluntary choose it and others who are pushed inside because of entry barriers to the formal sector (Günther & Launov, 2012). Using the SAHWA survey and discrete choice models, this article confirms the heterogeneity of the informal labor market in three Maghreb countries: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Furthermore, this article highlights the profiles of workers who voluntarily choose informality, which is missing from previous studies. Finally, this article proposes policy recommendations in order to extend social security to informal workers and to include them in the formal labour market.

In this paper, we present the results of financial knowledge assessment from a nationwide survey carried out in Poland in 2019. To measure this phenomenon, we use the well-grounded scale, the ‘Big Three’ financial literacy questions, proposed by Mitchell and Lusardi. The results are similar to those of studies in other countries. However, we find that financial literacy scores poorly predict reasonable answers to the retirement planning question. We present hypotheses to explain this finding and recommend potential solutions.

Informal employment is one of the critical issues surrounding labour market debate in the Arab region. The latest data shows that 85% of youth and 61% of adult workers are in informal employment in Arab states (ILO, 2020). The aim of this study is to elaborate the profiles of workers who choose informality and those who are excluded from formal employment and modern labour market. Using the SAHWA survey and discrete choice models, this article confirms the heterogeneity of the informal labour market in five Arab countries; namely, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia. Furthermore, this article highlights the profiles of workers who are more likely to voluntarily choose informality. Considering those profiles, this article will finally propose policy recommendations in order to extend social security to all informal workers, and thus achieve one of the Sustainable Development Goals on decent work (SDG8).