The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called the Food Stamp Program, is designed primarily to increase the food purchasing power of eligible low-income households to help them buy a nutritionally adequate low-cost diet. This book describes the rules related to eligibility for SNAP benefits as well as their redemption.

With contributions ranging from academic and professional theorists and policy developers to independent social workers, this book explores the development of family-centered services, the processes by which these services are implemented, the problems the field now faces, and prospects for the future. Multi-faceted examinations of the field show how family-centered services and child well-being can be linked on a daily basis to better the lives of both parents and children.

Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and post-socialist transition, and a health economist take on this challenge. They offer health sector reform recommendations for ten countries of Eastern Europe, drawn from nine guiding principles. The authors conclude that policymakers need to achieve a balance, both assuring social solidarity through universal access to basic health services and expanding individual choice and responsibility through voluntary supplemental insurance.

Analyzing the critical juncture of family-centered policy and practice, this book places the universal institution of the family in a global context. By including a conceptual framework as well as practice components, the authors offer an original multimodal approach toward understanding family-centered policy practice from an international perspective. It provides grassroots strategies for activists and practical guides for both students and practitioners and includes cutting-edge interpretations of the impact of globalization on families, social workers, and other helping professionals and advocates.

This book explores two fundamental shifts in the paradigms of governance in Western bureaucracies: the widespread use of privatization, private firms and market methods to run core public services, and the conscious attempt to transform the role of citizenship from ideals of entitlement and security to new notions of mutual obligation, selectivity and risk. Mark Considine examines a key service of the modern welfare state unemployment assistance--to explain and theorize the nature of these radical changes. He has undertaken extensive research in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand--four countries which have been among the boldest reformers within the OECD, yet each adopting distinctively different models and programs.

Time and Poverty in Western Welfare States is the English language adaptation of one of the most important contributions to welfare economics published in recent years. Professors Leibfried and Leisering offer a time-based (dynamic) analysis of the study of poverty, and suggest the need for a radical rethinking of conventional theoretical and policy approaches. Its methodology will make it of great interest to students and researchers in the social sciences, with particular importance for social policy and welfare economics.

Since the 1970s social security in the European Union has been dominated by attempts at reform and cost control. In the last decade of the twentieth century these attempts have been strengthened by the coming European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This book offers an overview of the social security system and its development in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. The national contributions are preceded by an introduction on the development of social security in Europe till the present day, with special reference to the postwar process of European integration and its effects. The book is concluded by two essays. The first examines the danger and opportunities of European integration for social security. The second discusses ethical aspects: what effect will European integration have on the quality of social security in Europe?

This collection of essays, first published in 2000, was the first systematic attempt to explain the social, administrative, technical and cultural history of 'European' housing in Australia. Written by a collaborative team of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, it explains how Australian housing has evolved from the ideas brought by the first settlers, and what makes Australian housing distinctive in social terms. This book covers a broad range of topics including the ways in which houses reflect social values and aspirations, the relationship between houses and gardens, the home as a site of domestic production and consumption, and an exploration of how housing provides the basis for developing a sense of community. The book will be invaluable for students of urban affairs and those engaged in housing and the design professions, as well as policy-makers and analysts in the public and private sectors.

When parents must rely on public assistance and family shelters to provide for their children's most basic needs, they lose autonomy. Within a system of public assistance that already stigmatizes and isolates its beneficiaries, their family lives become subject to public scrutiny and criticism. They are "parenting in public."

This book is an in-depth examination of the realities of life for parents and their children in family shelters. The author uses the Massachusetts family shelter system to explore the impact of asset and deficit-oriented help-giving approaches as they are experienced by mothers and service providers.

The format of the book is unique. Following each chapter are the "reflections" of a mother who has parented in a shelter, a front-line worker, and a shelter director. The author and contributors propose a "Power With" policy and practice framework that runs counter to the prevailing "Power Over" cultural policy trends.

Contributors include Rosa Clark, Brenda Farrell, Deborah Gray, Michele Kahan, Margaret A. Leonard, Mary T. Lewis, Nancy Schwoyer, and Elizabeth Ward.

This collection of essays, first published in 2000, was the first systematic attempt to explain the social, administrative, technical and cultural history of 'European' housing in Australia. Written by a collaborative team of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, it explains how Australian housing has evolved from the ideas brought by the first settlers, and what makes Australian housing distinctive in social terms. This book covers a broad range of topics including the ways in which houses reflect social values and aspirations, the relationship between houses and gardens, the home as a site of domestic production and consumption, and an exploration of how housing provides the basis for developing a sense of community. The book will be invaluable for students of urban affairs and those engaged in housing and the design professions, as well as policy-makers and analysts in the public and private sectors.

This book provides an overview of the current Social Security special minimum benefit provision workings; explains how the Retirement Earnings Test works under current law; and examines the windfall elimination provision (WEP) which reduces the Social Security benefits of workers who also have pension benefits from employment not covered by Social Security.

As the ranks of the elderly continue to swell and their social welfare becomes a complex and contentious policy issue, how will the United States balance the conflicting demographic and economic demands of providing for its older citizens -- especially in light of the anticipated economic burden of the baby boom generation's impending retirement? These problems place the destiny of Social Security and health care at the epicenter of political discussion and debate, making a balanced perspective on these issues essential -- particularly as the lives of millions of future Americans will be affected. "The Generational Equity Debate" offers social workers, policy analysts, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as general readers concerned about the fate of the elderly, a complete range of viewpoints on this vital subject.

The fifth edition of this successful textbook discusses the different parts of the welfare system and, in particular, cash benefits, the health service and education. The text argues that the welfare state does not exist just to help the underprivileged, but also for means of efficiency, in areas where the private markets would be inefficient or would not exist at all.
Suitable for both economics students and students on related disciplines, this book is accessible and contains a non-technical appendix in every chapter, diagrams, additional readings, worked examples and end of chapter discussions.
Online Resource Centre
For students:
- Web links
- Further reading
- Links to related Oxford Scholarship Online titles
For lecturers:
- PowerPoint slides - these have been expanded for the fifth edition

How has America's social welfare network benefited families living in poverty? In what ways has it failed to provide for their needs? The system of social welfare in the United States has been in place for most of this century-and although it has had lasting impact on the lives of many people in need, it is far from perfect in its handling of the nation's poor. Fragile Families, Fragile Solutions presents a historical perspective on one of the central components of the U.S. social welfare network-family services-and provides a unique look at the advances this service network has achieved, problems it has confronted, and where it is likely to go in the future.

Beginning with an exploration of the nineteenth-century roots of family services and the emergence of family casework at the beginning of this century, Halpern ranges through the 1920s and 1930- charting the influence of psychoanalytic theory in social service work and government responses to the Depression. He surveys the following two decades, when policymakers attempted to respond to changing inner-city populations. An extended section focuses on the 1960- a critical reform period. Covering a wide spectrum of contemporary issues in policy and organization, as well as escalating crises in such areas as child welfare, Halpern brings readers up to date on this complex subject.

Offering policy recommendations for the future, Halpern inspires social workers and policymakers alike with a symbolic goal of constructing a more positive vision of the potential of social services, and a pragmatic objective of designing an efficient, effective family services network to care for Americans in greatest need of support.

What is the role of race in social policy? Have race-based programmes failed? Should welfare and civil rights be blind to colour? In this landmark book, two leading scholars challenge critics like William Julius Wilson and Theda Skocpol who seek to replace a "race-specific" agenda for African-Americans with class-neutral programmes. Dona Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton transform our understanding of the history of civil rights. From the New Deal to the 1990s, they demonstrate the many ways in which the civil rights movement fought not only to end racial segregation and discrimination but also to support social and economic justice for all Americans. Drawing on an unprecedented range of data, the Hamiltons describe the complex connections between race and class that have marked American social reform since the beginning of the welfare state. They reveal an aspect of the civil rights struggle which has been too long overlooked or obscured - one that has fought for policies to expand social and economic welfare for blacks and whites alike. From the NRA and WPA to the Great Society and the War on Poverty, from the NAACP, National Urban League and the Congressional Black Caucus to A. Philip Randolph, Marian Wright Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund and many others, the Hamiltons chart the changing strategies and describe the often fierce battles that civil rights groups fought over this "dual agenda". Decade by decade, they demonstrate how the movement for African-American civil rights has always included economic and social welfare reform for everyone. "The Dual Agenda" is not only an indispensable new history of modern America, it is also a powerful critique of conventional wisdom of the left and right about the supposed failure of civil rights organizations to pay attention to "universal" social welfare policies. At a time of severe political retrenchment, either from the Republican right or the Democratic centre, the Hamiltons remind us, as the nation grapples with a major new welfare reform law, that the African-American struggle for civil rights has always been bound to the American ideal of equality and security for all.

Based on much original research, this book examines in detail the emergence of retirement as a social issue in the period 1878 to 1948, focusing in particular on the evolution of state pensions. Important new insights are offered into the role of key individuals, such as William Blackley, Joseph Chamberlain, and Charles Booth and interest groups, such as the Charity Organisation Society, the friendly societies, the labour movement and pensioners' organisations. Subsequent sections examine the shift to contributory pensions as part of the 'new Conservatism' of the 1920s, the debate on retirement pensions in the following decade, the treatment of old age poverty by the inter-war social surveys, and the concern over the 'burden' of an ageing population in the late 1930s. The book concludes with a radical reinterpretation of the 1942 Beveridge Report. This book promises to be the definitive history of state pensions in Britain.

The fast changing economic climate is creating substantial pressure for welfare state restructuring worldwide. Yet the discussion regarding challenges faced and the responses required has been confined to the 'standard welfare states' in the West. This book examines whether these challenges also apply to the countries in the East, whether these countries have generated different responses to their Western counterparts, and whether they have undergone a process of regime transformation while responding to these pressures. Comparative in approach, this book offers lively discussion on the new social challenges faced in East Asia following the unprecedented scale of the recent global financial crisis. It reaches beyond policy descriptions to offer more systematic analyses of welfare restructuring in the region in relation to the fast changing global economic order. By examining the dynamics of welfare state restructuring both in terms of continuity and change, it explores intensified impacts of global restructuring of welfare and the nature of welfare state adaptation in the region. This fascinating and thought provoking read will prove invaluable to academics, researchers and students with an interest in social policy, international social policy, comparative social policy. Contributors include: P. Abrahamson, N. Goishi, T. Hiroko, J. Hudson, G.-J. Hwang, D. Jung, S. Kuhner, S.S.-y. Lee, J. Liu, K.H. Mok, C.-u. Park, J. Yamashita

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This volume is the second of three addressing a wide range of policy issues relating to the role of public action in combating hunger and deprivation in the modern world. It deals with the background nutritional, economic, social, and political aspects of the problem of world hunger. Volume 2 deals with famine prevention, paying particular attention to sub-Saharan Africa. The topics covered include: the problems of early warning and early action; the politics of famine prevention; the influence of market responses; the role of cash support and employment provision in protecting threatened food entitlements; and long-term issues of reduction of famine vulnerability. In addition to general analyses, the book contains a number of case studies of failures and successes in famine prevention, both in South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, these essays provide a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the problem of hunger and deprivation, and an important guide for action.

Today 13 million people are living in poverty in the UK. According to a 2017 report, 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line. The new poor, however, are an even larger group than these official figures suggest. They are more often than not in work, living precariously and betrayed by austerity policies that make affordable good quality housing, good health and secure employment increasingly unimaginable. In The New Poverty investigative journalist Stephen Armstrong travels across Britain to tell the stories of those who are most vulnerable. It is the story of an unreported Britain, abandoned by politicians and betrayed by the retreat of the welfare state. As benefit cuts continue and in-work poverty soars, he asks what long-term impact this will have on post-Brexit Britain and - on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report - what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.

The Social Security program pays benefits to retired and disabled workers and their family members, and to family members of deceased workers. The Social Security program is financed primarily through payroll taxes that are deposited in the U.S. Treasury and credited to the Social Security trust fund. Any revenues credited to the trust fund in excess of program costs (benefit payments and administrative expenses) are invested in special U.S. government obligations (debt instruments of the U.S. government). This book examines the basics of how the Social Security program is funded and how the Social Security trust fund works.

Welfare state models have for decades been the gold standard of welfare state research. Beyond Welfare State Models escapes the straitjacket of conventional welfare state models and challenges the existing literature in two ways. Firstly the contributors argue that the standard typologies have omitted important aspects of welfare state development. Secondly, the work develops and underlines the importance of a more fluid transnational conceptualisation. As this book shows, welfare states are not created in national isolation but are heavily influenced by transnational economic, political and cultural interdependencies. The authors illustrate these important points of criticism with their studies on the transnational history of social policy, religion and the welfare state, Nordic cooperation within the fields of social policy and marriage law, and the transnational contexts of national family policies. This fascinating work contributes to the understanding of the current changes of welfare states by discussing the relationship between globalized capitalism and social political regulations and by arguing that transnational transformations importantly take place within and between nation states.With its challenging and questioning approach, this cross-disciplinary book will appeal to social policy and welfare state researchers, academics and policy makers.

Why did slums and suburbs develop simultaneously? Did the capitalist system produce these, and were class antagonisms to blame? Why did the Victorians believe there was a housing problem, and who or what created it? What housing solutions were attempted, and how successfully? These are amongst the central questions addressed by social and urban historians in recent years, and their arguments and analyses are reviewed here. The history of housing between 1780 and 1914 encapsulates many problems associated with the transition from a largely rural to an overwhelmingly urban nation. The unprecedented pace of this transition imposed immense tensions within society, with implications for the urban environment and for local and national government. Housing is central to an understanding of the social, economic, political and cultural forces in nineteenth-century history; this book is an ideal introduction to the topic.

The development of European welfare states in the first half of this century has often been seen as a response to the rise of class politics. This study of social policies in Britain and France between 1914 and 1945 contests this interpretation. It argues, by contrast, that early policymakers and social reformers were responding equally to a perceived crisis of family relations and gender roles. The institutions they developed continue to structure the welfare state as it exists today. This book is innovative in the range and scope of its research, its comparative focus, and its argument, which poses a challenge to older class-based interpretations of the development of the welfare state. It will be of interest to scholars of European history and politics, as well as to those interested in social policy and women's studies.

This volume deals with one of the most understudied aspects of everyday life in Russian society. Its main heroes are the providers of goods and services to whom people turn for healthcare instead of official medical institutions. A wide range of agents is describedfrom network marketing companies to 'folk' journals on health as well as healers, complementary medicine specialists, and religious organizations. Krasheninnikovas book is based on rich empirical observations and avoids both positive and critical assessment of the analyzed phenomena. Her investigation pays particular attention to the legal, social, and economic status of informal healthcare providers. She demonstrates that these agents tend to flourish in bigger towns rather than in small settlements, where public healthcare is lacking. The study reveals the important role of institutions that are generally not related to alternative medicine, such as pharmacies, libraries, and church shops. The result is a vivid and thorough introduction to the world of self-medication and alternative healing in contemporary Russia. A special emphasis was made on the flexibility of boundaries between formal and informal healthcare due to the evolution of rules and regulations.

The untold story of how welfare and development programs in the United States and Latin America produced the instruments of their own destruction In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.