In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the internal migration of a growing population transformed Britain into a 'society of strangers'. The coming and going of so many people wreaked havoc on the institutions through which Britons had previously addressed questions of collective responsibility. Poor relief, charity briefs, box clubs, and the like relied on personal knowledge of reputations for their effectiveness and struggled to accommodate the increasing number of unknown migrants. Trust among Strangers re-centers problems of trust in the making of modern Britain and examines the ways in which upper-class reformers and working-class laborers fashioned and refashioned the concept and practice of friendly society to make promises of collective responsibility effective - even among strangers. The result is a profoundly new account of how Britons navigated their way into the modern world.

Consuming Crisis is a crucial account of how consumer culture capitalized on Coronavirus (COVID-19). Sobande explores how brands claim to care while they encourage people to 'keep calm and consume'. This critical analysis of the power and politics of marketing examines an eclectic mix of campaigns, content, and experiences. Such work outlines the societal significance of fast-fashion adverts, banana bread's pandemic 'moment', university social media strategies, and how digital technology mediates memories and work. Based on the belief that brands cannot be activists, Sobande creatively considers how brands construct care, camaraderie, culture, and so-called 'normal' life during times of crisis. Francesca Sobande is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University

In this unique and pathbreaking book, David Reisman examines the relatively new phenomenon of health travel. He presents a multidisciplinary account of the way in which lower costs, shorter waiting times, different services, and the chance to combine recreational tourism with a check-up or an operation all come together to make medical travel a new industry with the potential to create jobs and wealth, while at the same time giving sick people high-quality care at an affordable price. The book illustrates that it is no longer the case that medical attention must be consumed at home. Patients are travelling to Mexico, India and Thailand for a heart bypass. They are going to Hungary, Poland and Malaysia for dentistry. Doctors are migrating to Britain, the USA and Canada for new challenges. Hospitals are opening subsidiaries in Dubai, the Philippines and Costa Rica to see overseas patients on the spot. Integrating academic perspectives from medicine, tourism, health economics, development studies and public policy, the author concludes that the benefits both to the importing and the exporting nations are considerable, but that there are also some costs. He suggests that the new industry should be regulated and supported in order that it can do its best both for the local population and for the sick people who travel abroad for treatment. This fascinating and highly original book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in areas such as health economics, tourism, social policy, development studies, Asian studies and public policy. It will also prove invaluable to practitioners actively involved in planning and delivering medical attention in the global economic order.

Richard Titmuss (1907-1973) was a pioneer in the field of social administration (now social policy) and this reissued classic contains a selection of his most famous writing on social issues. It covers subjects ranging from the position of women in society, changes in family life, and the social effects of industrialisation, to the problems of an ageing population, pensions, social security and taxation policy, and the development of the national health service. This collection contains one of Titmuss's most original contributions to the analysis of welfare policy - his reflections on 'The social division of welfare'. The book stands the test of time as representative of his thinking, and as an inspiration to those who wrestle with the complex issues of our welfare state.

The purpose in this paper is to summarize existing evidence on welfare dependence among immigrants in Denmark and to supply new evidence with focus on the most recent years. Focus is on immigrants from non-western countries. The paper contains an overview of the background regarding immigration in recent decades followed by a survey of relevant benefit programmes in the Danish welfare state. Existing studies focus on both macro analyses of the overall impact from immigration on the public sector budget and on micro oriented studies with focus on specific welfare programs. Existing studies focus on the importance for welfare dependence of demographic variables, on the big variation between countries of origin and on the importance of cyclical factors at time of entry and during the first years in the new country. Evidence from the most recent years reinforce the importance of aggregate low unemployment in contrast to fairly small effects found from policy changes intending to influence the economic incentives between welfare and a job for immigrants.

The Oxford Handbook of Economics and Human Biology provides an extensive and insightful overview of how economic conditions affect human well-being and how human health influences economic outcomes. Among the topics explored are how variations in height, whether over time, among different socio-economic groups, and in different locations, are important indicators of changes in economic growth and economic development, levels of economic inequality, and economic opportunities for individuals. The book covers a broad geographic range: Africa, Latin and North America, Asia, and Europe. Its temporal scope ranges from the late Iron Age to the present. Taking advantage of recent improvements in data and economic methods, the book also explores how humans' biological conditions influence and are influenced by their economic circumstances, including poverty. Among the issues addressed are how height, body mass index (BMI), and obesity can affect and are affected by productivity, wages, and wealth. How family environment affects health and well-being is examined, as is the importance of both pre-birth and early childhood conditions for subsequent economic outcomes. Reflecting this dynamic and expanding area of research, the volume shows that well-being is a salient aspect of economics, and the new toolkit of evidence from biological living standards enhances understanding of industrialization, commercialization, income distribution, the organization of health care, social status, and the redistributive state affect such human attributes as physical stature, weight, and the obesity epidemic in historical and contemporary populations.

The transformation of night-watchman states into welfare states is one of the most notable societal developments in recent history. In 1880, not a single country had a nationally compulsory social policy program. A few decades later, every single one of today's rich democracies had adopted programs covering all or almost all of the main risks people face: old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment. These programs rapidly expanded in terms of range, reach, and resources. Today, all rich democracies cover all main risks for a vast majority of citizens, with binding public or mandatory private programs. Three aspects of this remarkable transformation are particularly fascinating: the trend (the transformation to insurance states happened in all rich democracies); differences across countries (the generosity of social policy varies greatly across countries); and the dynamics of the process. This book offers a theory that not only explains this remarkable transition but also explains cross-national differences and the role of crises for social policy development.

The 1986 article by Grossman and Hart "A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration " has provided a framework for understanding how firm boundaries are defined and how they affect economic performance. The property rights approach has provided a formal way to introduce incomplete contracting ideas into economic modeling. The Impact of Incomplete Contracts on Economics collects papers and opinion pieces on the impact that this property right approach to the firm has had on the economics profession. It shows that the impact has been felt sometimes in significant ways in a variety of fields, ranging from the theory of the firm and their internal organization to industrial organization, international trade, finance, management, public economy, and political economy and political science. Beyond acknowledging how the property rights approach has permeated economics as a whole, the contributions in the book also highlight the road ahead--how the paradigm may change the way research is performed in some of the fields, and what type of research is still missing. The book concludes with a discussion of the foundations of the property rights, and more generally the incomplete contracting, approaches and with a series of contributions showing how behavioral considerations may provide a new way forward.

Western welfare states are in a period of significant transition. Changes in the nature of work and the family, the growing elderly population, and other developments over the past fifty years have rendered existing welfare policies largely out-of-step with economic and social conditions. While welfare state reform clearly raises important questions about justice and social policy, political philosophers have been slow to address it. Justice, Care, and the Welfare State takes up the important task of developing a theory of justice to guide contemporary welfare state reform. Applying normative political philosophy to public policy issues, it addresses questions such as: What role, if any, should states play in supporting families? Should the state support national health care and, if so, why and in what form? What does society owe to the elderly? What role should welfare states play in supporting disabled people? What obligations does the state have toward the poor? As distinct from many works of political philosophy, Justice, Care, and the Welfare State draws on empirical data about the populations and circumstances of existing Western societies and offers concrete policy advice for reforming welfare policies. Noting that many of the challenges confronting people in post-industrial societies involve issues of care, Engster draws on a public ethics of care to develop his theory of welfare state justice, outlining specific policy proposals in the areas of the family, education, health care, old age pensions and long-term care, disability, and poverty and unemployment. The book offers important insights into how Western welfare states can be reformed in light of recent economic and social changes in order better to promote justice. It should be of interest to political philosophers, welfare state scholars, public policy analysts, and others interested in thinking about contemporary policy reform and justice.

Even as life expectancy in many countries has continued to increase, social security and similar government programs can provide strong incentives for workers to leave the labor force when they reach the age of eligibility for benefits. Disability insurance programs can also play a significant role in the departure of older workers from the labor force, with many individuals in some countries relying on disability insurance until they are able to enter into full retirement. The sixth stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security programs and labor force participation, this volume draws on the work of an eminent group of international economists to consider the extent to which differences in labor force participation across countries are determined by the provisions of disability insurance programs. Presented in an easily comparable way, their research covers twelve countries, including Canada, Japan, and the United States, and considers the requirements of disability insurance programs, as well as other pathways to retirement.

This book discusses the crisis of caregiving as it affects parents seeking to provide good care for their children and people who care for their aged or disabled relatives. Discussed are alternatives to the present welfare system, a description of the current safety net programs, and an analysis of the privatization of social services.

This book, a sequel to Inequality and Public Policy in China (2008), examines the evolution of inequality in China from 2002 to 2007, a period when the new 'harmonious society' development strategy was adopted under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. It fills a gap in knowledge about the outcomes of this development strategy for equity and inequality. Drawing on original information collected from the recent two waves of nationwide household surveys conducted by the China Household Income Project, this book provides a detailed overview of recent trends in income inequality and cutting-edge analysis of key factors underlying such trends. Topics covered include inequality in education, changes in homeownership and the distribution of housing wealth, the evolution of the migrant labor market, disparities between public and non-public sectors, patterns of work and non-work, gender, ethnicity, and the impacts of public policies such as reforms in taxation and social welfare programs.

Two decades of federal and state-level demonstration projects and experiments concerning cash welfare in the United States culminated with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as welfare reform. Ten years after reform there remain a host of unanswered questions on the well-being of low-income families. In Welfare Reform and its Long Term Consequences for America's Poor, many of the nation's leading poverty experts address these and related outcomes to assess the longer-term effects of welfare reform. A diverse array of survey and administrative data are brought to bear to examine the effects of welfare reform and the concomitant expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit on the level and distribution of income, the composition of consumption, employment, public versus private health insurance coverage, health and education outcomes of children, marriage, and social service delivery.

"European Welfare Futures" presents a clear and up-to-date analysis of developments in social policy in the main EU member states. It provides a systematic account of welfare retrenchment and assesses the competing explanations of this process. The authors provide convincing evidence for the view that an 'ever closer union' in social policy will require a much more difficult process than that which led to monetary union.

The book makes a major contribution to understanding how welfare policy in Europe will develop over the next few years. It offers an original and wide-ranging account of the forces affecting the direction of policy, and stresses the role of social and political institutions in explaining why countries differ.

"European Welfare Futures" will be essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and scholars in social policy, sociology, political science, area studies and international relations courses. It will also be of great interest to policy-makers in the EU, especially in the areas of pensions, health, social care and unemployment.

What do economists have to say about behavior within the context of the family? This book improves our understanding of how families and markets interact, why important aspects of families have been changing in recent decades, and how families respond to, and are affected by, public policy. It covers a broader range of topics with more consistency than have previous studies, including all major theoretical developments in the field over the past decade. John Ermisch builds his analysis on the premise that the standard analytical methods of microeconomics can help us understand resource allocation and the distribution of welfare within the family. Families are dynamic institutions--and so the author uses these same methods to study family formation and dissolution (including marriage, fertility, and divorce) and household formation, as well as intergenerational transfers, household production and investment, and bargaining between family members. He also shows how economic theories of the family can help guide and structure empirical analyses of demographic and related phenomena, such as labor supply, child support, and returns to education. Examples of studies that apply the theory are provided throughout the book. The most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to an increasingly dynamic area of research, one with important implications for public policy, An Economic Analysis of the Family will be a valuable resource for advanced students of microeconomics and also for students and researchers in sociology, psychology, and other social sciences.

An analysis of the social and economic malaise of western society and the role of the Churches in countering it. High unemployment in many areas, the rise of drug-related crime, extensive vandalism and anti-social behaviour, street crime, and the problems of the police in dealing with race and juvenile crime, have produced a bleak picture of the breakdown of modern society. The underlying social problems are the breakdown of the traditional family and the support mechanisms that it provided, coupled with the attempt to erode the moral principles that underlay traditional social thinking. Governments have sought to improve the obvious social problems, but have failed to examine the underlying causes of the malaise. Governments anxious in a pluralist society not to offer any special position to the church, traditionally the main supplier of support, have also ignored the voices of the Jews, Muslims and Hindus. This book argues that the only answer is to reinstate the traditional partnership between church and state, both nationally and at the local level, because the church has the locally-based organization that the state lacks, and a moral framework that offers the order that society needs. Through a series of case studies from different regions, the book demonstrates the effectiveness of the grass-roots organization of the church and the moral authority that it provides, showing how church and state working together can help to forge a new understanding of the oldest institution of all, the family. The author offers an understanding of and the means to a solution to the problems that afflict modern societies.

Grandparenting in divorced families is the first in-depth exploration of grandparents' relationships with their adult children and grandchildren in divorced families. It asks what part grandparents might play in public policy and whether measures should be taken to support their grandparenting role. Do grandparents have a special role in family life that ought to be recognised in law? This book examines grandparents' roles and functions and gives voice to their attitudes and opinions. Grandparenting is often represented sentimentally with too little account taken of the diversity of attitudes and behaviour. The study asks challenging questions about grandparents' contributions to family life and comments on the legal and policy implications. It includes fascinating discussion of issues such as: grandparents who are excluded and ignored; partisan behaviour and its effect on family relationships; communicating across the family divide; change and continuity in grandparents' relationships with their grandchildren. This groundbreaking book is intended for a wide readership. Grandparents and parents in divorced families will identify with many of the thoughts, feelings and experiences r

In "The Economics of Welfare," originally published in 1920, Pigou reconceptualized economics as a science of economic welfare, in the course of which he developed the first systematic theory of market failures. Employing Alfred Marshall's theoretical framework and the utilitarian logic of Henry Sidgwick, he argued that the Smithian 'system of natural liberty' can fail to maximise economic welfare in three crucial spheres. Economic transactions grounded in the free play of self-interest may achieve a suboptimal allocation of resources by producing spillovers; they may maldistribute the national income, damaging much of the population; and they may generate business cycles, causing unemployment as well as income and consumption instabilities. In his analysis of how to repair these failures, Pigou made an elaborate, carefully reasoned case that interventions in otherwise unfettered markets may be in order.
This reissued classic includes a new introduction by Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes, who offer fresh ideas on "The Economics of Welfare" as a treatise that cannot be reduced to a programmatic collection of taxes and subsidies designed to maximise economic welfare. They also spell out the implications of Pigou's thought for contemporary economics.

There has been a remarkable upsurge of debate about increasing inequalities and their societal implications, reinforced by the economic crisis but bubbling to the surface before it. This has been seen in popular discourse, media coverage, political debate, and research in the social sciences. The central questions addressed by this book, and the major research project GINI on which it is based, are: - Have inequalities in income, wealth and education increased over the past 30 years or so across the rich countries, and if so why? - What are the social, cultural and political impacts of increasing inequalities in income, wealth and education? - What are the implications for policy and for the future development of welfare states? In seeking to answer these questions, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on economics, sociology, and political science, and applies this approach to learning from the experiences over the last three decades of European countries together with the USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, and South Korea. It combines comparative research with lessons from specific country experiences, and highlights the challenges in seeking to adequately assess the factors underpinning increasing inequalities and in identify the channels through which these may impact on key social and political outcomes, as well as the importance of framing inequality trends and impacts in the institutional and policy context of the country in question.

A timely and incisive look at austerity measures that succeed-and those that don't Fiscal austerity is hugely controversial. Opponents argue that it can trigger downward growth spirals and become self-defeating. Supporters argue that budget deficits have to be tackled aggressively at all times and at all costs. In this masterful book, three of today's leading policy experts cut through the political noise to demonstrate that there is not one type of austerity but many. Looking at thousands of fiscal measures adopted by sixteen advanced economies since the late 1970s, Austerity assesses the relative effectiveness of tax increases and spending cuts at reducing debt. It shows that spending cuts have much smaller costs in terms of output losses than tax increases. Spending cuts can sometimes be associated with output gains in the case of expansionary austerity and are much more successful than tax increases at reducing the growth of debt. The authors also show that austerity is not necessarily the kiss of death for political careers as is often believed, and provide new insights into the recent cases of European austerity after the financial crisis. Bringing needed clarity to one of today's most challenging subjects, Austerity charts a sensible approach based on data analysis rather than ideology.

No sector has been as vital as oil to the Russian economy since Vladimir Putin came to power. The longest serving leader since Stalin, Putin has presided during a period of relative economic prosperity driven largely by booming oil windfalls. Oil in Putin's Russia offers an in-depth examination of the contests over windfalls drawn from the oil sector. Examining how the Russian leadership has guided the process of distributing these windfalls, Adnan Vatansever explores the causes behind key policy continuities and policy reversals during Putin's tenure. The product of over ten years of research, including interviews with decision-makers and oil industry officials, Oil in Putin's Russia takes an innovative approach to understanding the contested nature of resource rents and the policy processes that determine how they are allocated. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive and timely account of politics and policy in contemporary Russia, and a significant contribution to research on the political economy of resource rents in mineral resource-rich countries.

It is widely assumed that Americans care little about income inequality, believe opportunities abound, admire the rich, and dislike redistributive policies. Leslie McCall contends that such assumptions are based on both incomplete survey data and economic conditions of the past and not present. In fact, Americans have desired less inequality for decades, and McCall's book explains why. Americans become most concerned about inequality in times of inequitable growth, when they view the rich as prospering while opportunities for good jobs, fair pay and high quality education are restricted for everyone else. As a result, they favor policies to expand opportunity and redistribute earnings in the workplace, reducing inequality in the market rather than redistributing income after the fact with tax and spending policies. This book resolves the paradox of how Americans can express little enthusiasm for welfare state policies and still yearn for a more equitable society, and forwards a new model of preferences about income inequality rooted in labor market opportunities rather than welfare state policies.

Elites have a disproportionate impact on development outcomes. While a country's endowments constitute the deep determinates of growth, the trajectory they follow is shaped by the actions of elites. But what factors affect whether elites use their influence for individual gain or national welfare? To what extent do they see poverty as a problem? And are their actions today constrained by institutions and norms established in the past? This volume looks at case studies from South Africa to China to seek a better understanding of the dynamics behind how elites decide to engage with economic development. Approaches include economic modelling, social surveys, theoretical analysis, and program evaluation. These different methods explore the relationship between elites and development outcomes from five angles: the participation and reaction of elites to institutional creation and change, how economic changes affect elite formation and circulation, elite perceptions of national welfare, the extent to which state capacity is part of elite self-identity, and how elites interact with non-elites.

This book questions whether the recently promoted European 'social investment' strategy is able to regenerate the welfare state, promote social inclusion, create more and better jobs, and help address the challenges posed by the economic crisis, globalisation, ageing and climate change. To assess the diversity, achievements, shortcomings and potentials of social investment policies, it brings together some of the best social policy scholars and well-known policy experts, connecting academic and policy debates around the future of the welfare state. Supported by the Nordic Center of Excellence NordWel and the EU funded Network of Excellence RECWOWE (Reconciling Work and Welfare).