November 9–10, 2018

This conference is closed to the public.

As a first step towards gaining a better understanding of the role of consumer subsidies in the global welfare state, this workshop brings together political scientists and sociologists who specialize in consumer subsidy programs and welfare in each of the regions where these programs have been important (in other words, every region except western Europe). The goal is to formulate a shared comparative framework. By asking the participants to review the literature on this topic for each region, we seek to identify the most important variation in subsidy policies and their welfare outcomes, as well as to identify key country cases. To keep the scope manageable, we focus primarily on food subsidy programs, since they have diffused more widely and have proven to be especially durable. Furthermore, we focus on the period defined by the transnational campaign that began in the 1980s to reform these subsidy programs.