Increasingly ageing populations and a slowing rate of growth in the macroeconomy are forcing advanced countries to reconsider their social security programmes. The need for detailed examination of the possible reforms and initiatives has never been greater.
This book brings together internationally-renowned scholars to evaluate the effect of recent social security reforms in advanced countries (pension programmes in particular) and to suggest policy reforms for the future.
Including detailed studies of countries including Australia, Germany, Japan, Scandinavia, the UK and the USA, this book will be of essential interest to economists and policy-makers working in pension financing reform, and public economics more generally.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203217152

A fundamental handbook to the family health model Family Health Social Work Practice: A Knowledge and Skills Casebook is a comprehensive guide to an emerging practice paradigm in the social work field. Edited by pioneers of the family health approach (who also contribute several chapters each), this book introduces the theoretical model and skills of the practice, including a framework for developing a family health intervention plan, illustrated by case scenarios. Issues vital to any family health intervention are addressed in 10 case studies that further explain the application of the practice model. Family Health Social Work Practice stresses a holistic orientation to assessment and intervention from a health perspective that includes the physical, mental, emotional, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of family life. With its focus on practice theories, practical information, and evaluation strategies, the book provides a strong foundation for skills development in the family health model. A collection of articles from the leading practitioners and academics in the field gives a thorough and thoughtful examination to issues ranging from domestic violence to substance abuse to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Family Health Social Work Practice also reviews the philosophy behind the family health approach, summarizes its effectiveness, and examines other critical concerns, such as: child maltreatment mental health spiritual diversity aging agency management One of the few casebooks to present practical intervention plans with accompanying case scenarios, Family Health Social Work Practice is an essential resource for students and professionals in the social work and human services disciplines, and an unrivaled reference for libraries. Helpful tables and figures make the information easy to access and understand.

In this important book, nine leading scholars probe deeply into the nature of social rights, trying to read the near future and locate the most meaningful and effective role that social insurance can play as today's new socio-economic patterns develop. In-depth chapters analyse existing systems and recent and ongoing reforms in seven countries-Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and China. There is also a chapter on the European Union's work toward a harmonised scheme to match other programs of integration, and a chapter on the all-important interpenetration of social insurance and human rights. The authors clearly demonstrate that the unprecedented challenges faced by social insurance today arise not only from changes in the patterns of society, but also from lack of confidence and ideological prejudice on the part of both academia and public policy. As a major analysis of why and how a great milestone in human progress is faltering under contemporary pressures, this book is of enormous value. It deserves to be read and absorbed by all professionals in the field who want to use their knowledge and skill to ensure a future in which every man, woman, and child is provided with opportunity to live as full a life as possible. The essays in this book are based on papers first delivered at an international symposium held in Taipei in September 2000 under the auspices of the Center of Labor Law and Social Law of Chengchi University, with the support of several public and private agencies in Taiwan.

Globalization is reshaping the field of health promotion practice. In this innovative study, the authors outline health promotion's traditional concerns and argue that 'a policy of glocalization' (thinking globally, acting locally) can succeed in establishing health equality and achieving empowerment individually, locally, nationally and globally. Drawing on international examples across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, this study analyses economic policies and their link to health, particularly in relation to the developing world. Globalization affects health in varied ways and this book examines the competing ways in which 'global health' has been framed in public policy, concluding by revealing how health promoters can respond to globalization's new challenges.

The welfare state has been one of the most significant developments in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on much recent research, The Twentieth-Century Welfare State narrates its principal changes and provides a thematic historical introduction to issues of finance and funding, providers and users and the role of the welfare state as a system of social stratification. Change and continuity are central themes, while the 'moving frontier' between the state and other suppliers in the mixed economy of twentieth-century welfare is also analysed.

This book explores in detail the concept of homelessness by examining the dynamics of shelter living and the financial costs in comparison to the psychological costs to the children and the family. A comparison is made with housed low-income families to highlight the fact that homelessness, outside of poverty, does play a key role in the negative outcomes of homeless children and families. Psychological well-being is defined with behavioural outcomes and self-concept while family functioning is defined with parenting dimensions, family environment and social supports. Strong recommendations are made for program implementations to provide a comprehensive response to the needs of homeless families with children.

The Central Asian republics represent the poorest area of the former Soviet Union and this book contains the first rigorous analysis of household living standards in the region. Part I deals with methodological issues of measuring household welfare in transition, Part II quantifies living standards in various ways, and Part III looks at support given by the state, firms, other households and NGOs - the 'mixed economy' of welfare provision. The book is characterised by analysis of newly available survey data.

This text is a clear and thorough introduction to political philosophy and political thought. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of a major political thinker and clearly introduces one or more of their most influential works. The reader is then introduced to key secondary readings, aiming to complement and further their understanding of the thinker and text in question. Key features of the book also include clear exercises, reading notes and guides for further reading. The book is structured around eight major works including Machiavelli's "The Prince"; Hobbes - "Leviathan"; Locke- "The Second Treatise of Government"; Rousseau - "The Social Contract"; " Two Concepts of Liberty' by Isaiah Berlin'; Marx and Engels - "The German Ideology (Part 1)"; and Mill - "On Liberty". This text provides students with the skills necessary to understand the main thinkers, texts and arguments of political philosophy. It requires no previous knowledge of philosophy or politics and is suitable to anyone coming to political philosophy and political thought for the first time.

Consisting of both shorter pieces and reprints of entire books, this set restores to circulation a number of key texts from the debate about the future of welfare that took place in Britain following the depression.
The collection covers the following areas:
* The period during which the country felt the full impact of the world depression. A number of solutions were put forward during this time to address the arising issues - in particular the consequences of mass unemployment. The approaches ranged from orthodox Marxism to modified conservatism and "middle opinion"
* A key feature of the debate was the concept of planning as a device to enable governments to cope with economic and social problems. * A range of different ideas were widely canvassed during the war years. It was considered that successful conduct of war could then be applied to the problems of peace. This set resurrects certain proposals, influential in the climate of the times, which have subsequently dropped out of circulation
* Early assessments dealing with the implications of Welfare State legislation are also included. Although the implementation of the welfare programme was in effect a bipartisan process it did not take long for doubts to be expressed - some of which were directed at the principles on which the Welfare State was being constructed

While insights sometimes are slow in coming, they often seem obvious when they finally arrive. This handbook is an outcome of the insight that the topics of social support and the family are very closely linked. Obvious as this might seem, the fact remains that the literatures dealing with social support and the family have been deceptively separate and distinct. For example, work on social support began in the 1970s with the accumulation of evidence that social ties and social integration play important roles in health and personal adjustment. Even though family members are often the key social supporters of individuals, relatively little re search of social support was targeted on family interactions as a path to specifying supporter processes. It is now recognized that one of the most important features of the family is its role in providing the individual with a source of support and acceptance. Fortunately, in recen t years, the distinctness and separateness of the fields of social support and the family have blurred. This handbook provides the first collation and integration of social support and family research. This integration calls for specifying processes (such as the cognitions associated with poor support availability and unrewarding faIllily constellations) and factors (such as cultural differences in family life and support provision) that are pertinent to integration."

Family Policy focuses on the main family activities that are of concern in social policy and social work. This book explores how families behave and questions the implications for policies and practice. Perceptions of and responses to family 'pathologies' - teenage pregnancies, family breakdown, family poverty and violence - are examined. Core issues in family policy are considered, to help students to understand and evaluate the family policies at the hear of Labour's welfare reforms. This will be a valuable text, particularly for HE students with little previous knowledge of family policy.

Therapeutic Intervention with Poor, Unorganized Families: From Distress to Hope offers you integrated theories, practice, and research to provide you with the tools to be more effective when dealing with families in crisis. Therapeutic Intervention with Poor, Unorganized Families explores the decline of families into extreme distress and helps you to determine the best intervention for that particular family, as no one single method can be prescribed for all families. Therapists as well as clients favor the joint-goal intervention you will discover through this book, which is carried out mostly in the family home where the therapist can delegate authority as a means of strengthening and preserving the family. Through Therapeutic Intervention with Poor, Unorganized Families, you will receive a plethora of ideas which consist of multiple intervention techniques and alternatives for intervention, including: learning to organize institutions in the community to participate in getting families in extreme distress out of their long and perpetual predicament teaching you how cooperation between various government organizations, public and private, can be solicited for the welfare of these families offering you an anthro-psycho-social model of intervention that you will find effective in your own practice examining case studies so you can see how the new model works in real-life settingsTherapeutic Intervention with Poor, Unorganized Families is unique because not only does it offer you help with supervision and training aspects, but because it also ends with a qualitative and quantitative research evaluation of this new model. Comprehensive and thorough, this book deals with the difficulties that may arise to interfere with the effectiveness of the intervention so you can learn from it and prevent further crisis. Therapeutic Intervention with Poor, Unorganized Families is a must for anyone working with families in crisis.

Written by one of the world's leading policy researchers, this book seeks to assess the threat posed to modern welfare states by globalization and demographic change. Using empirical methods, and bringing together insights from across the social sciences, Castles interrogates a range of theories suggesting that the welfare state is in crisis. Systematically using data for 21 advanced OECD nations, he distinguishes crisis myths from crisis realities, locating, in the process, likely trajectories of welfare state development in coming decades.
The findings of this book confront many of the basic assumptions of contemporary scholarship. Economic globalization has not led to a 'race to the bottom'. Analogous processes within the European Community have not led to a 'downward harmonization' of social spending. There is no 'new politics of the welfare state', with the Left still outspending the Right. Over the past two decades, spending has been increasing and converging across the OECD. Rather than being in a state of crisis, western welfare states have achieved a steady state.
The supposed impact of population aging on social welfare budgets also turns out to be myth, with differences in spending actually being a function of the structure of welfare systems, not of any demographic imperative. The only potentially real threat is of rapidly declining fertility, but Castles argues that welfare state spending in the form of family-friendly public policy is, in fact, our best defense against this problem.
This is a book with significant policy implications. It identifies the factors likely to mould welfare state growth and decline in future years, and the diverse problems and challenges confronting welfare state policymakers in different families of nations. It is a book for those who like assessing evidence before jumping to unwarranted conclusions, and a book for those who wish to see 'the shape of things to come'.

Nearly one half of the world's urban population lives in poverty and about 800 million people occupy substandard housing. This "housing crisis" has continued unabated despite over 20 years of research and policy. At the forefront of new policy initiatives, confirmed by recent conferences such as Habitat II in Istanbul, is an inititiative to afford greater priority to finance, yet, with the expediation that the provision of small quantities of finance to low-income households will bring real improvements to the quality and quantity of housing provision. This book explores the linkages between formal and informal housing finance drawing upon the lessons of NGO and micro-finance practices. Both public and private formal finance institutions have experienced great difficulty in lending below a middle-income client group, and are often reluctant to lend for the purpose of housing at all. This failure of formal finance to filter down to low-income households, and in particular to women, has led various NGOs and community groups to create and adopt innovative finance programmes, such as informal savings banks and credit rotating schemes. The authors critically assesses the impact of these

This work provides a comprehensive introduction to housing studies. Integrating contributions from across the spectrum of areas connected with housing, this multi-disciplinary, topical book is designed for students embarking on degree and diploma courses in housing, surveying, town planning and other related subjects. Professionals within these fields should also find the book useful as a source ofup-to-date information and data. Multi-disciplinary and including many illustrations and examples, this book focuses on key topics which include: equal opportunities and housing organizations; town planning and housing development; housing management, design and development; environmental health and housing; property, housing law, policy-making and politics; housing policy and finance prior to and post Thatcherism; and future policy issues under the new Labour government post 1997. Housing, often the largest item in personal expenditure, is humankind's most essential need after nourishment. Examining ways to satisfy this need, whether through an adequate provision of public or private investment or through mixed funding schemes, the authors stress the importance of housing market activity

This work provides a comprehensive introduction to housing studies. Integrating contributions from across the spectrum of areas connected with housing, this multi-disciplinary, topical book is designed for students embarking on degree and diploma courses in housing, surveying, town planning and other related subjects. Professionals within these fields should also find the book useful as a source ofup-to-date information and data. Multi-disciplinary and including many illustrations and examples, this book focuses on key topics which include: equal opportunities and housing organizations; town planning and housing development; housing management, design and development; environmental health and housing; property, housing law, policy-making and politics; housing policy and finance prior to and post Thatcherism; and future policy issues under the new Labour government post 1997.;Housing, often the largest item in personal expenditure, is humankind's most essential need after nourishment. Examining ways to satisfy this need, whether through an adequate provision of public or private investment or through mixed funding schemes, the authors stress the importance of housing market activity

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Southern European welfare states - in common with their northern counterparts - are under stress. They have become the object of studies exploring the southern "type" or "model" of welfare. This collection provides a series of both comparative and specific country analyses.

Extensive welfare, law, and policy reforms characterized the making and unmaking of Keynesian states in the 20th century. This collection highlights the gendered nature of these regulatory shifts and, specifically, the roles played by women - as reformers, welfare workers, and welfare recipients - in the historical development of welfare states. The contributors are leading feminist socio-legal scholars from a range of disciplines in the US, Canada, and Israel. Collectively, their analyses of women, law, and poverty speak to long-standing and ongoing feminist concerns: the importance of historically informed research, the relevance of women's agency and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice, the specificity of the experience of poor women and poor mothers, the implications of changes to social policy, and the possibilities for social change. Such analyses are particularly timely as the devastation of neo-liberalism becomes increasingly obvious. The current world crisis of capitalism is a defining moment for liberal states - a global catastrophe that concomitantly creates a window of opportunity for critical scholars and activists to reframe debates about social welfare, work, and equality, and to reinsert the discourse of social justice into the public consciousness and political agenda of liberal democracies. (Series: Onati International Series in Law and Society)

This important book builds a bridge between the literature on popular welfare deservingness and social welfare policies. It examines the relationship between the two, exploring the close correspondence between public opinion and public policy that has been present throughout the history of social welfare. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data in a mixed-methods approach, Tijs Laenen not only investigates popular attitudes towards some of the most contested and 'least-deserving' policy target groups, but also towards groups alleged to be highly deserving of social welfare. The chapters also examine how deservingness opinions relate to public support for the social obligations of welfare recipients, for example job-seeking requirements for the unemployed, which has often been overlooked in the field. Valuable insights are offered into the relationship between welfare deservingness and policy on a cross-national basis, making this a valuable read for sociology, political science and social policy scholars seeking a more in-depth understanding of cross-national differences in welfare policies and welfare attitudes. Policy makers and administrators will also find the study of both the macro-level of welfare regimes and the meso-level of welfare schemes useful.

Asset-based policies are becoming an increasingly important form of public and social policy globally. This sees individual assets - such as savings or housing--as crucial aspects of a new form of welfare provision emerging in countries such as the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In this book, the first of its kind, Rajiv Prabhakar provides a theoretical perspective on the emerging asset agenda as well as examining specific policies, including the British Child Trust Fund.

Few would dispute that the well-being of individuals is one of the most desirable aims of human actions. However, approaches on how to define, measure, evaluate, and promote well-being differ widely. The conventional economic approach takes income (or the power to acquire market goods) as the most important indicator for well-being, and the utility function as the formal device for positive and normative analysis. However, this approach to well-being has been questioned for being seriously limited and other approaches have arisen.
The capability approach to well-being, which has been developed during the last two decades by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and the Happiness Approach to well-being, championed by Richard Easterlin, both provide an alternative. Both approaches come from different traditions and have developed independently, but nevertheless aim to overcome the rigid boundaries of the conventional economic approach to well-being. Given these common aims, it is surprising that little comparative work has been undertaken across these approaches. This book aims to correct this by providing the reader with contributions from leading names associated with both approaches, as well as contributions which evaluate the approaches and contrast one with the other.

The majority of people, in cultures worldwide, seek fulfilment and happiness in marriage and couples relationships. Many mental health professionals now find they are increasingly consulted when such relationships encounter difficulties that threaten the wellbeing of the couples involved. The costs of such difficulties can be high, to society, to children and to other family members, in both emotional and economic terms. Psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, counsellors and social workers will find in this uniquely comprehensive handbook a critical review of knowledge in this wide field, as well as a guide to best practice in its many areas of intervention. The scope of the handbook includes an overview of healthy, normal marriage processes, the major influences on marital quality and stability, the interaction between individual adjustment, environmental events, and relationship satisfaction, and interventions designed to assist couples to enhance their relationship. The emphasis in the chapters which review research is on explicating the implications of current state-of-the-art knowledge for assessment and intervention with couples. Over half the book comprises detailed guidelines on how to conduct interventions for relationship problems. This includes work on different approaches to couples therapy, adapting couples therapy to the needs of couples in which one partner has significant individual psychopathology, working with just one partner, responding to crises initiated by extramarital affairs, mediating divorce, and working with families in which there are combined marital and parenting difficulties.

This edited collection presents a comprehensive examination of women's relationships to housing--both as consumers of housing services and managers of these services. The book begins with a discussion of women's experience of housing as buyers of property and users of housing services, examining in detail income differentials, the dominance of the needs of the nuclear family in housing forms and the ways in which housing allocations policies often discriminate against women. Subsequent discussion looks at women as producers of housing and assesses the structures within which they have to work.
While much of the literature to date has portrayed women as passive recipients of services and victims of discrimination, this volume shows the very active role women have played, for example in housing protest movements. Throughout, the book is forward looking, considering the possibility of new housing forms which would challenge gender assumptions and be more attractive to women. The contributors make policy recommendations necessary to the creation of affordable housing and employment and training agencies to ensure better equal opportunity policies.

Since the 1970s the public commitment to social solidarity between citizens through comprehensive provision of welfare has been eroded by the imperatives of international markets. In this volume the problems posed to public intervention are analyzed. The contributors compare and evaluate how different countries have dealt with these challenges.