Richard Rose’s Welfare Goes Global provides a concise and incisive overview of human welfare around the world. Valuable to experts and generalists interested in the relevant social science and policy questions, the book assembles copious metrics while grappling with problems of theory and method. Part I outlines the thematic, geographical, and temporal dimensions of welfare; Part II tackles the specifics of health, education, and women’s labor; and Part III considers the international processes of globalization and development. In a couple hundred pages and with dozens of illuminating charts and graphs, Rose introduces the reader to the state of the world, the state of the field, and his own disciplinary interventions.

What determines a society’s welfare, its material well-being, and access to healthcare, education, and fruitful employment? “A country’s welfare,” Rose explains, “reflects the combined resources of all the institutions that make up its welfare mix: the household, the market, and the state” (p. 2). This trio is salient. The developing world especially relies on the household and its “unpaid work” (p. 63). The market’s “double contribution to the welfare mix” comprises money for goods and services and tax revenue for state programs (p. 33). Welfare is not “inherently ‘statist’” (p. 4) even though Google finds “50% more references to the welfare state than to individual welfare” (p. 34). Indeed, an indeterminate correlation arises between state funding and some healthcare metrics, as public health spending matters less than the overall GDP percentage (p. 93). But Rose recognizes the importance of the public sector, whose employees in highly developed countries are largely “teachers and health workers delivering welfare services” (p. 36).

Rose explores welfare’s theoretical contours and the difficulties in measuring it. He acknowledges the “psychologically oriented social scientists” who “have sought to reduce the meaning of welfare to a single goal: life satisfaction or happiness” (p. 19). But Global Welfare emphasizes hard data, without which policymakers become driven by “personal experience, anecdotes, or an ideology” (p. 49). Rose offers “objective measures … such as life expectancy, literacy, and employment … from a multiplicity of international organizations” (p. 4). Impersonal metrics have real human implications. Rose discusses how these measures arose with the development of social science, such institutions as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (p. 51), and such conventions as the “International Standard Classification of Education” (p. 108). But measuring welfare remains challenging. There is, for instance, no universal measure of poverty (p. 59).

Some of Global Welfare’s most compelling analysis concerns socio-economic development and the difficulties of international comparison. Global data are rich and imperfect, based on academic and market research in “more than 100 countries” (p. 79). The World Bank’s Statistical Capacity Index reveals that countries cannot collect data equally well (p. 26). Rose explores such analytical problems as whether economic development drives social development or vice versa. He nevertheless highlights four crucial factors: national GDP, urbanization, low corruption, and individual freedom (p. 70). The Corruption Perceptions Index demonstrates high levels of corruption in developing countries (p. 75), while both qualitative and quantitative methods elucidate resource development, culture, history, and public expenditures (p. 80).

Development poses differing questions across nations. For most UN members yet to achieve global standards of health, education, and employment, progress might not mean fully catching up. But for a static goal like full adult literacy or zero infant mortality, Rose posits a “fixed-target hypothesis” that “if a country is making progress toward a fixed welfare goal, then it will catch up with a global welfare standard in time” (p. 153). Highly developed nations pursuing moving targets, in contrast, can enjoy compounding improvements, since “a seemingly small annual rate of change” applied to an “ever-expanding base” can make “each year’s progress … substantial” (p. 20). But on fixed welfare goals these nations will hit a ceiling. They “long ago reached” the “mathematical limit of virtually 100 percent adult literacy.” (p. 25) Britain ranks 27th-best in the world in infant mortality but only has three more annual deaths per thousand compared with Estonia, which ranks 1st (p. 23). Little ironies also abound, including a correlation between development and increased female smoking (p. 99). Still, the overarching modern takeaway is dramatic improvement in global welfare. Women’s life expectancy has improved “in every country” Rose’s book covers. In 1993 the World Bank found the preceding 40 years to have produced history’s largest recorded improvement in “health conditions” worldwide (p. 89). While we rightly scrutinize definitions and methods, this human progress demands some realism and hope.

Rose’s excellent book invites some probing discussion. Usually Rose defines welfare holistically to include all factors of human wellbeing. In other contexts, “welfare” is legible in narrower socio-institutional terms: Rose finds that today “globalization of welfare has reached a point where a majority of households on every continent have access to one or more forms of welfare” (p. 16). And while Rose makes reasonable assumptions about universally desirable blessings, questions linger on the margins. It is intuitive that progress is “even more important to the billions of people who have yet to attain the welfare of global standard-setters,” but one might seek more references to welfare economics literature on interpersonal utility comparisons (p. 1). We can agree with Rose that “long life is better than a short life, infant mortality is bad” and probably that “literacy is preferable to illiteracy.” But ultimately it might be more contestable that “young people should have more education than their grandparents,” at least depending on how much education—however defined—generations have had (p. 15).

Global Welfare elicits questions about global and historical comparisons. It links the individual and collective, as welfare emerges from the “interaction across national boundaries of individual choices, impersonal market forces, and national government policies” (p. 195). Rose notes some imperfections of international analysis, where “politicians can selectively draw comparisons between countries” for “partisan” purposes (p. 13). Yet more fundamentally, international comparisons rely on the nation, a troublesome analytical unit. Rose relays the World Bank’s use of the term “country” as interchangeable “with economy,” which “does not imply political independence” (p. 27). Amidst the importance of national, local, and household welfare sources, Rose holds that the “globalization of welfare is not caused by international interdependence” (p. 22). This seems a controversial and urgent notion today, introducing issues of trade, migration, and foreign policy that could drive consequential structural moves in political economy for the impending years.

Regarding history, Rose helpfully reminds us that it was “German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck” who used the idea of the “social state … to describe the introduction of novel policies” to adjust the “individual’s reliance on the household and the market.” But calling this an “alternative to the liberal idea of a state that left individuals free to pursue their own interests” perhaps overstates the stark historical contrast (p. 42). One irony of this moment is that across bitter disagreements over what type of state is best—liberal, social, populist nationalist, or some mixture—we still see broad agreement over which societies have the most desirable welfare conditions. Given these heated debates and sometimes obscured consensus, Rose’s book gestures toward international and historical issues, and the boundaries of state and market, that deserve further contemplation.

In any event, Rose has successfully produced a concise volume for getting a handle of global welfare. The book sets the standard in assessing a large range of data and literature, providing great interventions and insights, all packaged with accessible and sharp prose useful to a wide range of scholars and for important and timely discussions.