This volume is the first in English to be devoted entirely to the analysis of social policy developments in southern Europe. It comes at an opportune moment, for not only are the southern Europe welfare states - in common with their northern counterparts - under stress, but they have also only recently become the object of in-depth studies, exploring for the first time the particularities of the southern 'type' or 'model' of welfare. The collection provides a series of both comparative and specific country analyses, furnishing new empirical detail and more general reflections on the character of social policy and welfare in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. It also buttresses the argument that although welfare states in the region share many of the features of other European welfare states, the existence of specific features, levels of development and institutional forms provide them, collectively, with a 'hugely different socio-political etiquette' which makes them worthy of analysis in their own right.