The European Union has strived for a uniform social model for quite some time. Nonetheless, this concept remains only an idea due to the diversity of its member states. Even the countries within an individual social submodel differ one from another. The aim of the master's thesis was to determine how successful and effective the selected countries within the Mediterranean social submodel were in tackling the economic crisis and how Slovenia coped with addressing the crisis. The research in the thesis covers the time before, during and after the economic crisis that started in 2008. The selected period shows changes in the value of specific indicators from the social sphere. To better understand the Mediterranean social submodel, the research also includes the Scandinavian, the Continental, the Anglo-Saxon and the East-European social submodel. Two statistical methods were used for the research in this master's thesis, the descriptive and the comparative method. The results show that Slovenia (as expected) portrayed the best results and was the most effective in fighting the economic crisis compared to other countries in the East-European social submodel. Slovenia also had the lowest rate of unemployment and the highest rate of economic growth after the crisis. The most effective among the social submodels is the Scandinavian social submodel, followed by the Continental and the East-European social submodels. The Mediterranean social submodel is comparable to the Anglo-Saxon one in relation to some indicators, while, compared to the other models, it portrays lower values. In future research, it would be reasonable to take good practices from each social submodel and try to create a new uniform European social model that would be appropriate at least to some extent for all the member states of the European Union.
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