The Effectivness of European Social Investment Paradigm and the South Asian Social Business Model in the Context of Socio-Economic Inclusion

The main objective of the paper is to indicate the contribution of the European Social Investment Paradigm and the South Asian Social Business Model to the process of socio-economic inclusion in both: developed and developing countries. According to Muhammad Yunus, the author of the concept, Social Business consists in a total renunciation of financial gain, it assumes a total departure from the previous business structure. Yunus describes capitalism as a system that created poverty and built the illusion of prosperity for everyone. Social Business introduces a revolutionary dimension to the free market economy. Social investment paradigm promoted in the social policy of the European Union and implemented - to a different extent - by individual EU countries, is a new concept of social policy, which is a response to the search for a new model of social policy. According to Anthony Giddens (1998), the state of social investment was to be the third way between neoliberalism and the post-war welfare state, the quintessence of a future-oriented approach in which the state becomes an entrepreneur. In this concept, state spending is seen as a form of investment in human capital and understood as positive prosperity. According to this assumption, the investment paradigm emphasizes policies that support the development and productivity of human capital and its use on the labour market, i.e. education, active labour market policy and social inclusion policy. The comparative study over Social Investment and Social Business are based on research conducted by the author in the project Innovative Social Investment project: Strengthening communities in Europe (Horizon 2020 project No 649189), as well as, on data collected during the interview with Muhammad Yunus during the internship at the University of Dhaka financed by The National Science Centre (2018/02/X/HS5/03087). The analysis focuses foremost on the problem of allocative efficiency in socio-economic policy. It is an attempt to answer the question whether there is one universal, at least on a regional scale, trajectory of sustainable socio-economic development.