Everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same’:The Italian welfare state facing new social risks

Italian society is very different from what it was 20 years ago. The social risks that the Italian population faced at the beginning of the 1990s have substantially changed, though some long-standing problems – such as poverty and unemployment, which are widespread in the South – still persist today. Although the main indicators of inequality exhibited a stable trend until the explosion of the current crisis, in the same period, major structural changes have largely redrawn the map of social risksIn this chapter, we show how these social and economic changes have not been matched by analogous transformations in the welfare system.