"While many authors cannot see beyond the borders of their own country, Haggard and Kaufman masterfully compare Latin America, East Asia, and East Europe from a global perspective. These two great scholars analyze urgent contemporary problems, the status and future fate of the welfare state, and the relationship of changes with the creation and development of democracy with remarkable expertise, precision, and human empathy."--Janos Kornai, professor emeritus, Harvard University and Collegium Budapest

"This ambitious book extends the theoretical framework of the literature on welfare states in the advanced capitalist countries, and situates the experience of these countries in a broader comparative context. Haggard and Kaufman bring out the multifaceted implications of development models and regime types for social policy. Their synthetic account is truly a tour de force and a testimony to the fruitfulness of cross-regional comparison."--Jonas Pontusson, Princeton University

"A masterly analysis of how political interests, economic circumstances, development strategies, and local history have shaped what are surprisingly different versions of the welfare state across the developing world. The authors combine fine-grained country analyses with intelligent use of data, and explain and extend the theory and literature on the modern welfare state. The book is both scholarly and readable."--Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development

"This book has no equal in the welfare-state literature, a truly impressive achievement. Haggard and Kaufman combine meticulous scholarship with sophisticated theoretical guidance in this study of welfare state evolution in LatinAmerica, Asia, and East Europe. The book not only fills a huge void in our knowledge, it also compels us to seriously rethink prevailing theory."--Gosta Esping-Andersen, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

"A very, very valuable book. Haggard and Kaufman are up to their old tricks--helping establish a new line of investigation in a desperately understudied field. This book will be widely read, heavily cited, and will inspire a generation of research. It is going to have an important impact in comparative politics and beyond."--Erik Wibbels, Duke University

"A major undertaking that will make a significant contribution to the scholarship on welfare states in political science and sociology. This ambitious book provides a wealth of information on twenty-one countries' social welfare trajectories from the end of World War II to the present. Haggard and Kaufman provide quantitative analysis of trends with detailed country histories, which makes for an empirically rich account."--Nina Bandelj, University of California, Irvine

The VA is not your loving Uncle Sam who opens his wallet and says, Here you are, nephew a $1,000 check per month for the rest of your life. That should take the pain out of your service injuries, writes John D. Roche. Far from it, he reveals. Though the Veterans Claims Assistance Act of 2000 requires Veterans Affairs to assist veterans in developing the foundation to support their claims, in reality if you rely on the VA to find and develop the evidence necessary to grant benefits then your claim is likely to be denied. "Claim Denied!" will help those veterans whose benefits have been denied correct the mistakes they made when they submitted their original claims. Appealing a VA decision is not an impossible feat, Roche says, but a veteran 's story must be presented in a well-organized and logical format, so any reviewing authority is able to understand the issues as they relate to the laws. This book explains in detail how to develop and present a successful appeal.

In the critically acclaimed La Fin de la Pauverte?, Romain D. Huret identifies a network of experts who were dedicated to the post-World War II battle against poverty in the United States. John Angell's translation of Huret's work brings to light for an English-speaking audience this critical set of intellectuals working in federal government, academic institutions, and think tanks. Their efforts to create a policy bureaucracy to support federal socio-economic action spanned from the last days of the New Deal to the late 1960s when President Richard M. Nixon implemented the Family Assistance Plan. Often toiling in obscurity, this cadre of experts waged their own war not only on poverty but on the American political establishment. Their policy recommendations, as Huret clearly shows, often militated against the unscientific prejudices and electoral calculations that ruled Washington D.C. politics. The Experts' War on Poverty highlights the metrics, research, and economic and social facts these social scientists employed in their work, and thereby reveals the unstable institutional foundation of successive executive efforts to grapple with gross social and economic disparities in the United States. Huret argues that this internal war, coming at a time of great disruption due to the Cold War, undermined and fractured the institutional system officially directed at ending poverty. The official War on Poverty, which arguably reached its peak under President Lyndon B. Johnson, was thus fomented and maintained by a group of experts determined to fight poverty in radical ways that outstripped both the operational capacity of the federal government and the political will of a succession of presidents.

Oil fuels the global economy and remains a staple of our energy system. Yet, its production and use continue to draw negative criticism, and an increasing number of people want to reduce or eliminate its use altogether. Profits and Power sheds light on how the oil system works, its key players, and the political and geopolitical issues related to its use. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the book traces the fascinating history of how oil production and its sale became the world's most profitable business. Tracing distinct eras in oil's past, Profits and Power shows how periods defined by shifts in price often dictated who controlled production, and who enjoyed the often enormous riches oil production generated. David A. Detomasi weaves together politics, geopolitics, and economics to provide a complete picture of how the system really works, and what direction it will take in the future. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the dangers and challenges oil dependency creates, knowledge of this crucial commodity has never been more relevant and critical for humanity's future. Profits and Power will resonate with anyone interested in, or charged with responding to, our evolving energy future.

Moving beyong traditional concern with pattern and process, this innovative text explores the political and legislative history of a raciala segregation in Britain. It provides a critical commentary on the development of national and local housing policy, on the operation of the major markets and institutions, and on the organization of urban management. This book rejects the reality of a racea as an explanatory construct, focusing instead on how and why racial inequality is constituted through economic, political and social activity. It is a contribution to the growing literature in search of an anti--racist social science. To that end, segragation is analysed not just as a spatial form, but also as a politically constructed problem and as a socially constructed way of life. Together, these insights implicate the organization of residential space in the iniquitous dispensation of many economic, welfare and civil rights associated with citizenship in capitalist democracies. The Politics of a Racea and Residence explores the connections between social geography, social administration and political science. The book gathers together a hitherto fragmented body of data to provide a reinterpretation of a racial segregationa that is both theoretically innovative and politically relevant. It will therefore serve the needs of advanced undergraduates in a variety of social science disciplines, while providing a useful source of reference for courses offering professional qualifications in housing and urban management.

"There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago.

Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.

Social Enterprise is a worldwide movement of alternative organisational and business models, but it is sometimes difficult to know precisely the meaning of the term. In Essential Social Enterprise, Freer Spreckley traces the origin and development of social enterprise and shows how, over time, both the term and values have been altered and sometimes misinterpreted. The book praises the growth of supplementary and essential initiatives that widen the support for social enterprise influencing traditional business infrastructure mechanisms. The best known is the triple bottom line of Profit, People and Planet that has become the default criteria for corporate social responsibility. The book's central thesis is that it is excellent to see the growth of complementary social tools and different social enterprise applications, but questions whether these are displacement activities avoiding essential system change to corporate ownership and control. The book argues that the original ideas of social enterprise are urgently needed now. We should go beyond the pleasantries of putting the word 'social' in the title and assuming that means change. Freer puts forward a convincing, clear and radical interpretation in defining Social Enterprise and argues that it is a powerful solution to some of today's problems. These, he suggests, are inequality, environmental degradation, poverty and the fetish of exclusivity and puts forward the solutions of a common ownership entity, governed democratically, with integrated financial, social and ecological guiding principles and combined performance measurement indicators and a planning and evaluation method. The book suggests these changes are of our time and urgently need to be applied by organisations and businesses to create system change and avert a social and environmental decline. Furthermore, Freer argues that organisations need to be regenerative, going beyond sustainability and reversing the tread of societal inequality and ecological catastrophe in how they are owned and controlled, operate and behave. The book proposes that governments worldwide enact legislation to create a 'Social Enterprise Act' to define and hasten new organisations and enterprises to help regenerate society and the environment.