Avlijaš, Sonja This chapter focuses on the politics of social investment in Central and Eastern Europe. It explains why, despite apparently similar historical legacies, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) have implemented social investment– oriented policies while the Visegrád countries (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) have not. !e chapter emphasizes economic and political factors that enabled these diverging dynamics of social investment provision in the two groups of countries during the 1990s and early 2000s, when Central and Eastern Europe was transitioning to capitalism and democracy. Analysis of the Baltic welfare policies in Chapter 7 in this volume points to a liberal “Anglo-Saxon Plus” approach to social investment as these countries place strong emphasis on education and human capital formation (though less so on other social investment policies), along with little emphasis on compensatory social policies. Chapter 8 in this volume, in contrast, indicates that the Visegrád countries have established the fewest and the least encompassing social investment policies in the European Union, expanding instead compensatory social policies as well as some workfare policies. The present chapter argues that these different outcomes were the result of structural changes (i.e., the different capitalist “growth strategies” that these two groups of countries pursued after the collapse of socialism). By “growth strategy,” Hassel & Palier (2021) “refer to a (relatively coherent) series of decisions and reforms, taken by either governments or producers’ groups (economic and social actors) in order to boost growth and stimulate job creation in a specific nation, and the rationale for these decisions” (p. 13). The Baltic countries pursued a growth strategy based on the expansion of information and communications technologies (ICT) and the knowledge-oriented service economy, which led them to invest in educational reform away from the industry-specific skills and vocational training of the socialist era and toward general skills1 and expansion of services-oriented tertiary education. On the other hand, the Visegrád countries focused on industrial upgrading, preservation of manufacturing skills from the socialist era, social insurance for industrial workers, and compensation for those who lost jobs due to these reforms. These two distinct trajectories of structural change were driven by the decisions and coalition-making dynamics of political actors in the post-socialist context of democratization and Europeanization but also constrained by the countries’ socialist legacies. eng Explaining the Contrasting Welfare Trajectories of the Baltic and Visegrad countries: : A Growth-Strategy Perspective info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart Key words: politics, Central and Eastern Europe, Baltic countries, Visegrad countries, social investment application/pdf 926964 bytes 2022 All rights reserved The World Politics of Social Investment. Volume II: The Politics of Varying Social Investment Strategies https://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:30046 doi:10.1093/oso/9780197601457.003.0009