The Economics of Social Insurance and Employee Benefits focuses on non-wage benefits paid to workers in the United States, covering both government-mandated and voluntarily provided benefits. The author argues that benefits affect workplace productivity, and concentrates on the economic thinking behind how to design non-wage benefits in order to achieve competitive advantage. Part I briefly introduces these programs and discusses some of the insurance and economic concepts that are useful both for evaluating current programs and in analyzing what changes might mean for future costs and benefits. Part II deals with mandated social insurance programs, while Part III discusses benefits voluntarily provided by employers. Throughout the book, private sector human resource practices and public sector human resource policies are linked to various benefit models: the human capital model; the passive participant model; the insurance model; the managed care model; and the integrated health benefits model. Butler argues that the current program-centered approach to human resource and risk management is often ineffectual because it (1) ignores overlapping benefits that mitigate useful cost-sharing mechanisms; (2) often results in the concentration of benefits among relatively few workers; and (3) sometimes has the unintended consequences of negatively affecting workers' human capital. In advocating a worker-specific' approach to employee benefits, the book offers a unique perspective on how human resource managers, risk managers, and public policy makers can promote those institutions and programs that best increase workers' productivity.

The story of Medicaid comes alive for readers in this strong narrative, including detailed accounts of important policy changes and extensive use of interviews. A central theme of the book is that Medicaid is a "weak entitlement," one less established or effectively defended than Medicare or Social Security, but more secure than welfare or food stamps. In their analysis, the authors argue that the future of Medicaid is sound. It has the flexibility to be adapted by states as well as to allow for policy innovation. At the same time, the program lacks an effective mechanism for overall reform. They note Medicaid has become a source of perennial political controversy as it has grown to become the largest health insurance system in the country. The book's dual emphasis on politics and policy is important in making the arcane Medicaid program accessible to readersand in distinguishing policy grounded in analysis from partisan ideology. This second edition features a new preface, three new chapters accounting for the changes to the Affordable Care Act, and an updated glossary.

Drawing upon qualitative material from parents and professionals, including ethnography, narrative inquiry, interviews and focus groups, this book brings together feminist and critical disability studies theories.

Living with Things provides an account of consumption in terms of its centrality to our dwelling practices. Its focus is on the home, particularly on the movement of people and things within and through it in everyday habitation. Here dwelling is seen as an activity, as doing things with and to the things to hand around us. Being 'at home' is achieved through living amongst things, as well as amongst people and other non-human presences, such as pets and gardens. Being at home is achieved through what we do with objects, the things that are acquired and stored, that linger around in our homes, sometimes for decades, and which we may eventually get rid of. These ordinary things make dwelling structures accommodating accommodations; they make them homes. Based primarily on a former coal-mining village in North-east England, this book explores practices of inhabitation, from moving in or being modernised, to the daily accommodation of sleep and children. It provides a demonstration of what happens to consumption research when it 'comes home' and is positioned not in sites of exchange but within the home and in households.

Demand for owner-occupied housing expanded dramatically across modern, industrialized societies in recent years leading to volatile increases in residential property values. Entry into the owner-occupied sector has become increasingly critical to households, while the viability of rental-tenure has been undermined. This book explores the rise of modern home-ownership as a cultural, socio-political and ideological phenomenon. It focuses on housing consumption across a range of societies dominated by a political and cultural commitment to home-ownership, which has been largely manipulated and ideologically charged.

"This book explores the 'lesbian baby boom'. Drawing on interviews with lesbian parents in two European countries, Sweden and Ireland, the book examines reproductive decision-making, reproductive health-care, the everyday spaces of parenthood such as daycare and schools, the negotiation of biology and kinship in families where only one partner is the biological parent, and the possibility for a more flexible approach to gender relations within these families."--BOOK JACKET.

One measure of public program response to rapidly expanding older populations is the approach to old-age pensions under social insurance, social assistance, and provident fund systems. Social insurance is clearly the preferred method of meeting the income needs of the elderly, but historical, as well as current social and economic conditions are forcing many nations to reevaluate the characteristics of viable and sustainable social insurance programs. This has led to a variety of innovations in old-age pension programs development, including revised benefit formulas, raised retirement ages, increased income testing, and expanded reliance on private occupational supplemental programs.

The essays in this new international handbook analyze the impact of the economic, social, and cultural effects of aging populations on government social insurance policies. They offer a perspective on how twenty different countries have approached income maintenance programs for the elderly. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate how governments, non-governmental entities, communities, and families respond to changes in traditional income and social service support systems. They provide not only descriptions of existing programs, but also a better understanding of the factors that gave rise to their distinct characteristics. This important new collection will be required reading for everyone involved in elderly services.

Estates on the Edge recounts the decline and rescue of low-income government-sponsored housing estates across Northern Europe giving a vivid account of the intense physical, social and organisational problems facing social landlords in five countries. The ownership, management and letting patterns diverge sharply between the Continent, Britain and Ireland, between council landlords, non-profit, co-operative and independent landlords. But their community problems reveal similar trends towards poverty, polarisation and incipient breakdown. To avert the threat of incipient ghettos the stabilising pressures need to be stronger than the growing pressures towards chaos. Governments have become directly involved in estate rescue because of the vital social role estates are playing. The book traces the process of decline and renewal and shows how we can learn the lessons of policy failures and successes.

The concept of homesteading is historically rooted in the efforts of the 1860s that contributed to the settlement of the western United States. As a means of reclaiming declining neighborhoods, urban homesteading enjoyed fleeting popularity since the early 1970s when, for a brief period, the notion of urban pioneers salvaging communities received exposure in the media. However, enthusiasm waned as the reality of operating the program tempered the idealism of the implementing agencies and prospective beneficiaries. Chandler examines urban homesteading programs from their beginnings at the local level in 1973, through federal enactment in 1974, and operation until May 1986. Based on case studies of Baltimore, Detroit, and Philadelphia, her work also draws on federal and local government reports and documents, as well as personal interviews with city officials and persons currently and previously associated with the Section 810 Program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The study provides a historical and legislative perspective on the development of urban homesteading and explores such relevant issues as the attitudes and experiences of local government, prevailing influences on the respective city's implementation plan, the effects of federal grants on local autonomy, methods of program implementation, program adaptation within the different political and organizational contexts, and development performance records of the individual cities. This carefully organized work investigates the various aspects of urban homesteading through an in-depth look at the literature on federalism, intergovernmental relations, and policy implementation. It presents the basic theme and constructs in the light of certain demographic and socioeconomic features, and discusses variations in urban homesteading implementation by comparing operations in each of the sample cities. The conclusions and findings are summarized and their theoretical implications are assessed.

The welfare state has a problem: each generation living under its protection has lower work motivation than the previous one. In order to fix this problem we need to understand its causes, lest the welfare state ends up undermining its own economic and social foundations. In The Welfare Trait, award-winning personality researcher Dr Adam Perkins argues that welfare-induced personality mis-development is a significant part of the problem. In support of his theory, Dr Perkins presents data showing that the welfare state can boost the number of children born into disadvantaged households, and that childhood disadvantage promotes the development of an employment-resistant personality profile, characterised by aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking tendencies. The book concludes by recommending that policy should be altered so that the welfare state no longer increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households. It suggests that, without this change, the welfare state will erode the nation's work ethic by increasing the proportion of individuals in the population who possess an employment-resistant personality profile, due to exposure to the environmental influence of disadvantage in childhood.

The history of welfare provision has generally focused on the rise of the so-called welfare state and institutional provision for the poor. Recent studies have begun to look beyond the state to other ways in which assistance, care, and support were provided in the past, but the focus remains primarily on the poor. This work widens our understanding of welfare by focusing not on the poor but on those who have some wealth. It draws attention to the importance of family as part of a "mixed economy" of welfare provision that also incorporates the state, the market, and the voluntary sector. This book offers an exciting new approach to the history of welfare by focusing attention on the complex range of sources of support drawn on to meet family needs. The chapters highlight the significance of the family as a link in in the provision of assistance. They also focus on the role played by gender relations in shaping welfare strategies. An extensive introduction is followed by ten chapters presenting detailed studies of the provision of family welfare across western Europe and the United States over the past four hundred years.

Bringing together many different theoretical viewpoints and empirical findings, this volume provides an up-to-date state-of-the-art report on violence in families. Included are in-depth analyses of child, spouse, and parent abuse, sibling violence, and sexual abuse.

The aim of this book is to identify the variation in welfare regimes and the corresponding welfare outcome at the micro level. The research agenda of this report sets out from the tradition of the 'social indicator movement', and recent regime research. This volume is of interest to researchers in quality of life research, economists and political scientists interested in welfare regimes and comparative social welfare research, and administrators in social planning and social work.

Rejecting those who urge a bootstrap approach to people living in extreme poverty on the edge of society, sociologist Barbara Arrighi makes an eloquent, compassionate plea for empathy and collective responsibility toward those for whom either the boots or the straps are missing. This book further offers solutions in consciousness raising, community collaboration, and informed, responsible public policy. The book is a critique of a system that purports to serve yet sometimes impedes the welfare of those who are in need of the basic elements for survival, including affordable shelter. It analyzes the structural factors of poverty and the social psychological costs of being poor and lacking a home. Utilizing interview findings from families who have lived in a shelter in northern Kentucky and from staff members, the book examines the degrading effects of shelter life on women's self-respect and children's development. Rather than an examination of individual pathologies leading to lack of shelter, it centers on women and children living in shelters and offers a sociological study of poverty and the family.

Soviet and Western sociologists come together in this book to present results of recent sociological surveys and to analyse important social issues against the background of the revelations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book spans six major issues: the family and women, social care, young people, deviance (including prostitution), leisure and privilege (including the black market).

Poverty, and calls to end it, date back centuries. Even in prosperous modern times, despite the huge transformation of society, poverty has persisted. The challenge is getting harder, not easier, because of more recent changes in society such as the social distance between people in poverty and others, changing family structures (and our mixed views about them) and changing community patterns. The recent economic crisis seems set to leave us with a very different economy in which some may never work. This book looks back at the struggle to rid the country of poverty and asks if the struggle is worth it. What would a poverty free country be like if we could overcome the obstacles which impede progress?

Modern Britain is characterised by marked inequalities in the distribution of wealth, which continue to fuel controversy and arouse strong, if adverse, feelings. Originally published in 1979, Inheritance and Wealth Inequality in Britain provides detailed evidence on the relative importance of inherited and self-made wealth. It is the first major work in the field since Wedgwood's pioneering study in 1929, and represents a major contribution to current debates on justice and inequality. The study is based on more than fifteen years of detective work on successive generations of the wealthy. Professors Harbury and Hitchens have searched through the public records of registered wills, contacted relatives, executors and solicitors and have even tramped through graveyards in order to build up their picture of how wealth is actually transmitted from generation to generation. Results of this research challenge the commonly held view that inheritance is no longer a main force in the perpetuation of wealth and demonstrate unquestionably that it remains a factor of paramount importance. The book helps to answer such questions as: what proportion of wealthy men and wealthy women are self-made? Do the rich tend to marry the rich? Which industries tend to favour self-made as against inherited wealth? What are the chances today of inheriting or dissipating a fortune? Inheritance and Wealth Inequality in Britain is essential reading for those academically and professionally concerned with policymaking on income and wealth distribution and with the tax system; and to students taking courses in welfare economics, public finance and the sociology of class. It is also an important contribution to the history of modern Britain.

Since the Garden of Eden, humanity has been concerned with shelter. Yet housing means different things to different people. This work is a comprehensive, historical reference guide that reviews housing concepts and issues. It introduces the reader to the current body of literature and seminal work in housing from a multidisciplinary perspective. The nature of the topic is multifaceted, fragmented, and demanding of serious study from diverse disciplines-this study spans the broad domains of housing knowledge in architectural history and theory; environment and behavior; design process and methods; and building and environmental technology. The book begins with a discussion of vernacular housing and American culture and makes the case that dwellings reflect the people of different regions, materials, techniques, and design traditions of an earlier time. The history of American housing is reviewed with biographies and bibliographies, setting the stage for the environmental and social science perspective of housing. Residential environments are then considered in the broad sense of home and housing. Neighborhood and community are examined with a special focus on people, behavior, and the physical setting. The arts and popular media chapter presents American popular housing as image and icon, focusing on the arts and popular media as channels of visual and symbolic information or communication. These channels include painting, prints, pattern books, photography, music, film, television and video, literature, how-to manuals, and newspapers and magazines. Taking a macro-level perspective, direct and indirect programs of public administration and policy for housing are discussed. Then, the complex systems of financing, and the prevalance and mechanisms for matching buyers with sellers is considered in the chapter that considers housing finance, marketing, economics and management. The chapter on environmental design, construction process, and technology reviews the professional disciplines and their perspectives on housing, special populations and accessibility needs, descriptions of building trades, terms, materials, construction processes and past industrial housing experiments, as well as issues of energy management, computer technology, futuristic housing, air quality and household hazards. Using current technology to conduct research, the final chapter breaks from the conventional ways of locating hard-copy, copyrighted references to a seemingly endless potential of electronic communication systems such as data tapes; on-line databases; other electronic databases; electronic mail; listserves, chat, and on-line communities; libraries; on-line electronic texts; software; and news and journals including electronic journals.

Inclusive Growth in Australia overturns two decades of assumptions that social policy is wasteful and a source of dependency. It reflects a global resurgence of the understanding that an active and effective social policy regime is vital not only for a flourishing society, but also for a strong economy. It explains this new paradigm of inclusive growth and shows how it can be implemented in Australia.Inclusive growth dismantles the idea that social development will automatically trickle down from untrammelled market based growth. Rather, growth must be managed so that it is employment centred, broad based across sectors and with a social security system promoting sustainability and equality of opportunity. The editors argue that productivity is 'nearly everything' when it comes to raising living standards. So while social policies will be about goals other than the economy, they must demonstrate their compatibility with an economic growth strategy.With contributions from leading national and international experts in the field including Marian Baird, Grant Belchamber, Gerald Burke, Saul Eslake, Roy Green and Peter Whiteford, Inclusive Growth in Australia shows that 'welfare state' spending is as much an economic investment as a measure of social protection. Written for policy makers, industry and NGOs as well as students, Inclusive Growth in Australia locates Australian economic and social policy within the most important emergent themes shaping international debate.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Scandinavia as a regional international society, including the Nordic Peace and the rise of the Scandinavian welfare state.

Schouenborg aims to take the next big step in the theoretical development of the English School of International Relations - particularly the structural version introduced by Barry Buzan. He analyses the formation of a Scandinavian regional international society over a 200-year period and develops the concepts of primary institutions and binding forces as an analytical framework. In doing so, he not only offers one of the first systematic applications of English School structural theory, but also sheds a new comparative light on the distinctiveness of Scandinavian international relations, and provides a novel intervention in the debates about the emergence of the so-called Nordic Peace. In the first part of the book Schouenborg explains the core concepts and discusses how one may distinguish a regional international society from the broader global international society in which it is embedded. In the second part he provides an in-depth study of the Scandinavian case, focussing on the periods 1815 to 1919; 1919 to 1989; and 1989 to 2010.

The Scandinavian International Society will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations theory, Scandinavian international relations and history, and researchers engaged in comparative welfare state studies.

This book introduces the concept of new social risks in welfare state studies and explains their relevance to the comparative understanding of social policy in Europe. New social risks arise from shifts in the balance of work and family life as a direct result of the declining importance of the male breadwinner family, changes in the labor market, and the impact of globalization on national policy-making. They differ from the old social risks of the standard industrial life-course, which were concerned primarily with interruptions to income from sickness, unemployment, retirement, and similar issues. New social risks pose new challenges for the welfare policies of European countries, such as the care of children and the elderly, more equal opportunities, the activation of labor markets and the management of needs that arise from welfare state reform, and new opportunities for the coordination of policies at the EU level.
The book includes detailed and up-to-date case studies of policy development across these areas in the major European countries. These studies, written by leading experts, are organized in a comparative framework which is followed throughout the book. They highlight the way in which national welfare state regimes and institutional arrangements shape policy-making to meet new social risks.
A major feature of this volume is the analysis of developments at the EU level and their interaction with national policies. The EU has been largely unsuccessful in its interventions in old social risk policy, but appears to have more success in its attempts to coordinate policy for new social risks. Experience here may provide lessons for future developments in EU policy-making.
The comparative framework of the book seeks to inform an understanding of the development of new social risks in Europe and of the particular political opportunities and challenges that result. It provides an original analysis of pressing issues at the forefront of European welfare policy debate and locates it at the heart of current theoretical debates.

Second homes - the cottage, the summer house, the bach - are an important part of the tourism and leisure lifestyles of many people in the developed world. Second homes are therefore an integral component of tourism experiences in rural and peripheral areas. Yet, despite their significance not only for tourism but also for rural communities and the rural economy, relatively little research has been undertaken on the topic until recent times. This volume represents the first major international analysis and review of second homes for over 25 years. It will provide a significant resource for those interested in changing patterns of tourism and leisure behaviour as well as the use of the countryside and peripheral areas. The book describes the economic, social and environmental impacts of second homes as well as their planning implications and places such discussions within the context of contemporary human mobility. The volume represents essential reading for those interested in rural regional development processes and the development of new rural leisure landscapes.

In all advanced Western nations, policy-makers have implemented encompassing welfare state reforms in recent decades breaking with past welfare arrangements. In particular, social democracy engaged in significant policy change under the Third Way paradigm and broke with its traditional reputation on welfare that had built the ties with the core constituency in the 20th century. The Electoral Consequences of Third Way Welfare State Reforms: Social Democracy's Transformation and its Political Costs provides a comparative study of the electoral consequences of Third Way welfare state reforms. The book demonstrates that Third Way reforms went against the social policy preferences of social democracy's core voters and indeed produced an electoral setback for social democrats at the ballots. Moreover, and accounting for cross-national variation, the analysis shows that the nature of the setback is contingent on the electoral system and the party competition social democrats face when reforming the welfare state.

Part of The Elgar Series on Central Banking and Monetary Policy, this book explores the relationship between central banking, monetary policy and income distribution. The usual central bank mandate - that of exclusively fighting inflation - is being increasingly questioned by policymakers and academics. Many countries are finding that there is a need for broader mandates that will have an impact on economic activity, unemployment and other economic issues. The chapters present a multitude of theoretical views on this topic, from classical and Marxist views to mainstream and post-Keynesian approaches. They consider the democratic aspects of central banking, critically assess the distributional outcomes of inflation targeting regimes and explore policymaking implications. Policy makers, academics and the financial press will appreciate the relevance of the material and state of the art discussions featured in Central Banking, Monetary Policy and Income Distribution.

The 2007-09 financial crisis and economic downturn inflicted considerable hardship on the U.S. population. This book argues that the financial crisis and ensuing recession reflected not just a malfunctioning of the financial system -- but also inequalities and insecurities in access to livelihoods that favor well-off groups and leave ordinary people shouldering undue burdens of downside risk. This book, a collection of original papers by leading social economists and scholars in related fields, examines social, distributional, and ethical dimensions of the downturn. It should be of broad interest to the social-science and economic-policy communities.