Spain

AT THE START OF THE contemporary age in Spain, the church mainly financed welfare for the poor. However, after the successive deamortizations of property belonging to hospitals and hospices, the church and local councils seriously truncated religious charity. This was replaced by liberal state-supported welfare.

In this new form of beneficence, being poor was not a religious state (the humble, mild, or blessed as expressed in the New Testament) or the description of those who owned nothing. Rather, it referred to a person who was without work or could not work because of age. There were two main periods: one in which welfare was the responsibility of local councils (1812–55), and another that gave greater control to the provincial councils (1849–1907), a period in which the religious institutions began, once again, to play a major role.

Also, at the end of the 19th century, the socialists of the German (Verein für Sozialpolitik) and British (Fabian Society) schools began to exert their influence. In Spain, this was reflected in the establishment of social security via the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Education 1876), organized by the professors of the Oviedo Group, alongside the “regenerationism” and social Catholicism of Leo XIII. This had its first antecedent in the Commission of Social Reforms (1883), created to compile information on the state of the working classes.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Institute of Social Reforms was created, as well as the National Social Welfare Institute (INP). Their aim was to stimulate popular welfare in the form of retirement pensions and to administer voluntary mutual benefits. These initial steps led to insurance funds covering job accidents (1900), compulsory job retirement (1919), and maternity (1929). A whole series of private Mutual Aid Societies, with scarce capital, also grew up (4,517 in 1916), which insured their members against accidents, old age, and even unemployment. The Second Republic (1931–36) attempted to round off the legislation with unemployment insurance, in the midst of the 1930s crisis, which was never passed into law.

Following the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the very destruction of the war and international isolation caused general poverty. The 1940 census recorded that social assistance agencies and the Kitchens of the Fraternity for the Poor and Needy attended to 4.5 percent of inhabitants at the start of the year. From 1940 to 1946 there were 30,000 deaths due to starvation. General F. Franco's government (1939–75) intervened in the economy and introduced ration cards, while the black market began to flourish.

The National Social Welfare Institute was put in charge of regulating the new state's social security. In addition to the already existing insurance for accidents, maternity, and job retirement, other plans were put into place: illness (1942), special farming regime (1958 and 1966), unemployment (1940, 1945, 1954, 1961, and 1972), and family bonus programs (1942 and 1946). Franco's dictatorship also took control of the Workers’ Mutual Funds and Associations, set up by firms and paid for through a tax on wages.

Toward the end of the 1950s, the Spanish economy embarked upon a process of liberalization (the 1959 Stabilization Plan) and began to grow, while Keynesian ideology spread among Spanish economists. Spain experienced an annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth of 6.42 percent from 1950 to 1974. This economic expansion generated structural changes in the social welfare system: emigration, a drop in the percentage of the working population employed in agriculture, and a growth in female employment. The process shattered the traditional welfare system (Cáritas, a religious nongovernmental organization, calculated that in 1965 there were three million Spaniards in a situation of absolute poverty) and forced the creation of social security in 1963 (Social Security Founding Law), which was passed in 1967 but which, by no means, meant the creation of a welfare state.

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