Applied Welfare Economics: Cost-Benefit Analysis for Project and Policy Evaluation presents a consistent framework for applied welfare economics and is grounded in a comprehensive theory of cost-benefit analysis, specifically focused on offering a practical approach to policy and project evaluation. After opening with a theoretical discussion of the concept of social welfare, a critical analysis of the traditional doctrine of welfare economics embodied in the Two Fundamental Theorems, and a presentation of social cost-benefit analysis, the book introduces readers to an applied framework. This includes the empirical estimation of shadow prices of goods, the social cost of labour and capital, and the assessment of risk. The book also examines real-life experiences with cost-benefit analysis, including ex-post evaluation of major projects, economic rates of return in different sectors, and a case study on privatisation. These chapters draw on first-hand research gained by the author team from years of advisory work for the European Commission and other international and national institutions. This second edition presents updated data, more international examples, and more coverage of topics such as very long run discounting effects and climate change as an intergenerational effect. It also includes more practical examples and end-of-chapter questions to aid student's learning. Applied Welfare Economics is a valuable textbook for upper-level courses on welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, public policy analysis and related areas.

Poor Families in America's Health Care Crisis examines the implications of the fragmented and two-tiered health insurance system in the United States for the health care access of low-income families. For a large fraction of Americans their jobs do not provide health insurance or other benefits and although government programs are available for children, adults without private health care coverage have few options. Detailed ethnographic and survey data from selected low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio document the lapses in medical coverage that poor families experience and reveal the extent of untreated medical conditions, delayed treatment, medical indebtedness, and irregular health care that women and children suffer as a result. Extensive poverty, the increasing proportion of minority households, and the growing dependence on insecure service sector work all influence access to health care for families at the economic margin.

This is a study of one of the central themes of pre-1914 British history - the move towards social reform and the accompanying growth of collectivism and bureaucracy. It focuses on the conditions under which Britain was willing to borrow political devices from imperial Germany and the problems inherent in borrowing from a different political culture. Compulsory social insurance had been pioneered by Germany in the 1880s to deal with the consequences of industrial injury, sickness, infirmity and old age for the working class. What interest did policy-makers in Britain take in this German innovation? Why did they initially consider it irrelevant? Why and to what extent did attitudes change? How could a German institution be adapted to British circumstances? These are the questions with which Dr Hennock is concerned in his study of British social reform. He examines British policy on compensation for industrial accidents, old age pensions and national insurance, and in a wide-ranging introduction compares this with developments in such other spheres as technical education and town planning in which German precedents had also challenged accepted ways. British Social Reform and German Precedents deliberately raises questions about innovation and resistance to innovation from abroad which are still relevant as Britain seeks to adapt to membership of the European Economic Community.

From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers, this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights and standards of living. The fourth edition witnesses the passing of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada - an era in which the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers and unions to act as subordinates in Canada's capitalist democracy. It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion - on force and on fear - to secure that subordination. From Consent to Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing socialist politics - of thinking ambitiously and meeting new challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy.

Across the EU, populations are shrinking and ageing. An increasing burden is being placed on a smaller working population to generate the taxes required for pensions and care costs. Welfare states are weakening in many countries and across Europe, households are being increasingly expected to plan for their retirement and future care needs within this risky environment. At the same time, the proportion of people buying their own home in most countries has risen, so that some two-thirds of European households now own their homes. Housing equity now considerably exceeds total European GDP.

This book discusses questions like: to what extent might home ownership provide a potential cure for some of the consequences of ageing populations by realizing housing equity in order to meet the consumption needs of older people? What does this mean for patterns of inheritance and longer-term inequalities across Europe? And to what extent are governments banking on their citizens utilising their housing wealth now and in the future? "

The international community's commitment to halve global poverty by 2015 has been enshrined in the first Millennium Development Goal. How global poverty is measured is a critical element in assessing progress towards this goal, and different researchers have presented widely-varying estimates. The chapters in this volume address a range of problems in the measurement and estimation of global poverty, from a variety of viewpoints. Topics covered include the controversies surrounding the definition of a global poverty line; the use of purchasing power parity exchange rates to map the poverty line across countries; and the quality, and appropriate use, of data from national accounts and household surveys. Both official and independent estimates of global poverty have proved to be controversial, and this volume presents and analyses the lively debate that has ensued.

This comprehensive survey of key welfare policy issues, in an age of globalization and ageing populations, draws on comparative OECD data and case studies from Scandinavia. Torben Andersen and Per Molander provide a forceful analysis of the main challenges to the traditional public sector welfare state and explore the principal policy options open to governments in advanced economies. They assess the advantages and disadvantages of alternative welfare regimes with less reliance on public sector involvement.

How do changes at home, in the labor market and on the job affect worker well-being? This volume of Research in Labor Economics contains eight original and insightful articles answering this question. Seven deal with demographic and labor market change, and one deals with wage differences essentially at a point in time. Of the seven, two articles analyze changes in family related matters and have implications regarding labor supply; two examine legislative changes, one of which has implications on teenage employment, and the other on informal business formation; one looks at potential productivity changes on farms in a developing country and has implications for remaining on the family farm or going to work; one models wage growth and shows why wages sometimes fall as one remains in a job longer; and finally, one investigates new enterprise formation over time.

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aTogether, the essays collected by Logue and Barton provide a vivid portrait of the social, political, economic, and cultural struggles of Civil War veterans.a
--"The North Carolina Historical Review"

"A marvelous collection of essays, The Civil War Veteran provides an indispensable introduction to the problems the veterans faced and the contributions that they made. The bibliography alone is an invaluable resource."
--Gaines M. Foster, author of "Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South"

"Never before has such a wide-ranging and excellent collection of readings on Civil War veterans been assembled in one place. A must have book for anyone interested in this topic."
--Donald R. Shaffer, author of "After The Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans"

"An excellent collection of essays on a largely neglected topic. . . . The editors have done a thorough job of considering the pivotal issues, selecting broad yet focused themes, and gathering the writings that best illustrate those issues and themes."
--Daniel Sutherland, University of Arkansas

The Civil War Veteran presents a profound but often troubling story of the postwar experiences of Union and Confederate Civil War veterans. Most ex-soldiers and their neighbors readjusted smoothly. However, many arrived home with or developed serious problems; poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, and other manifestations of post traumatic stress syndrome, such as flashbacks and paranoia, plagued these veterans. Black veterans in particular suffered a particularly cruel fate: they fought with distinction and for theirfreedom, but postwar racism obliterated recognition of their wartime contributions.

Despite these hardships, veterans found some help from federal and state governments, through the establishment of a national pension system and soldiers' homes. Yet veterans did not passively accept this assistance--some influenced and created policy in public office, while others joined together in veterans' organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic to fight for their rights and to shape the collective memory of the Civil War. As the number of veterans from wars in the Middle East rapidly increases, the stories in the pages of The Civil War Veteran give us valuable perspective on the challenges of readjustment for ex-soldiers and American society.

Having previously defined a good society as a sustainable society with a high level of development, significant provision of meaningful jobs, and low levels of inequality and social ills, Toward a Good Society in the Twenty-first Century provides a wide range of principles and policies that would be necessary if we are to achieve a good society.Marangos and Karagiannis have put together a comprehensive volume that explores the principles and policies needed to bring about the good society, and focuses on four broad themes which are deemed important towards achieving a good or better society: quality education and fair distribution; environmentally sustainable prosperity; inclusive economic development and significant job creation; and beneficial civic institutions, and deepening of freedom and time use. All these topics can be highly controversial and call for alternative perspectives on theoretical (philosophical) and policy grounds.

With rapid household growth exerting pressure on green belts and the growing dislocation of housing markets in different regions, housing is once again becoming a central issue on the British political agenda. Written by a well known group of researchers in lively and accessible style, this timely new book provides a broad ranging assessment of key policy developments in early Twenty first century Britain as they relate to both private and public sector housing spheres. MARKET 1: Undergraduate and postgraduate courses on housing policy/housing management; social policy; built environment; urban and regional studies etc on degrees in Housing; Planning; Public Policy/Management; Social Policy; Built Environment; Surveying; Estate Management and related professional qualifications MARKET 2: Housing and Local Government professionals and general policy readership; Wide public library sale

This book introduces a unique, new dataset on welfare state reforms in the UK, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany from 1974 to 2014. Using a variety of welfare state types in Europe, the authors have systematically investigated core questions that have preoccupied the welfare state literature at least since the 1990s. These include the extent of path dependency in mature welfare states, the usage of so-called "invisible" policy instruments for hiding cutbacks, and the role of partisanship - on whether the ideological color of the incumbent affects policy - which have been analysed in depth by examining the new dataset presented in this book. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners studying, and working in, welfare and the welfare state, and more broadly to political science, sociology and social policy.

By the end of the fifteenth century most European counties had witnessed a profound reformation of their poor relief and health care policies. As this book demonstrates, Portugal was among them and actively participated in such reforms. Providing the first English language monograph on this this topic, Laurinda Abreu examines the Portuguese experience and places it within the broader European context. She shows that, in line with much that was happening throughout the rest of Europe, Portugal had not only set up a systematic reform of the hospitals but had also developed new formal arrangements for charitable and welfare provision that responded to the changing socioeconomic framework, the nature of poverty and the concerns of political powers. The defining element of the Portuguese experience was the dominant role played by a new lay confraternity, the confraternity of the Misericordia, created under the auspices of King D. Manuel I in 1498. By the time of the king's death in 1521 there were more than 70 Misericordias in Portugal and its empire, and by 1640, more than 300. All of them were run according to a unified set of rules and principles with identical social objectives. Based upon a wealth of primary source documentations, this book reveals how the sixteenth-century Portuguese crown succeeded in implementing a national poor relief and health care structure, with the support of the Papacy and local elites, and funded principally though pious donations. This process strengthened the authority of the royal government at a time which coincided with the emergence of the early modern state. In so doing, the book establishes poor relief and public health alongside military, diplomatic and administrative authorities, as the pillars of centralization of royal power.

This book provides two main contributions to the existing literature on the history of welfare institutions and social rights in the 20th century. First, it is, to the best of our knowledge, the first research to analyze the cross-country comparison of welfare policies between the two countries from a historical prospective. The comparison is particularly interesting as we focus on two nations with very different institutional settings. On one side Switzerland, a federal state. On the other Italy, a centralized state until only very recently. The second important contribution of this book is the specific set of policies analyzed: policies aimed at protecting motherhood, childhood and women workers' rights during the 20th century, a period in which European society changed drastically.

Black Religious Landscaping in Africa and the United States uses the prism of spatial theory to explore various aspects of Black landscapes on the African continent and Black Atlantic diasporic locations. The volume explores the ways in which Black people in Africa and in the Diaspora have identified obstacles and barriers to Black freedoms and have constructed counter-landscapes in response to these obstacles. The chapters in the book present diverse representations of the Black creative impulse to form religious landscapes and construct social, economic and political spaces that are habitable for Black people and Black bodies. These landscapes and spaces are physical, psychological and conceptual. They are gendered and racialized in ways that are shaped by their specific religious, geographic and socio-historical contexts. These contexts are influenced by colonial systems and institutions of modern slavery. The landscapes that people of African descent struggle to construct, reshape and inhabit are intended to counter the effects of these oppressive systems and institutions and often include attempts to reclaim and adapt sources, concepts, tools and techniques that are indigenous to specific geographical contexts or ethno-racial groups. The contributors hope in this volume to offer a look at how the cartographic struggles and constructive engagements within these Black-inhabited spaces are rooted in Black movements that support the emancipation of Black lives and Black bodies from the oppressive forces of dominant geographies.

This 1997 book examines the income distributional experience of fifteen developed economies - representing a wide range of social and economic strategies - over the past two decades. Experts from each of the countries have carefully documented the pattern of distributional change in individual earnings and household income in their countries and analysed the driving forces behind these changes. Separate chapters are devoted to the experiences of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, West and former East Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The authors examine the effects on the inequality of household income of the development of individual earnings, unemployment, inflation, public sector transfers and taxes, and demographic changes.

This edited volume provides a synthesis on the question of business attitudes towards and its influence over the development of the modern welfare state. It gathers leading scholars in the field to offer both in-depth historical country case studies and comparative chapters that discuss contemporary developments. Composed of six archive-based historical narratives of business' role in the development of social insurance programs in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and six comparative case studies, this volume also extends the study of business to policy fields that have hitherto received little attention in the literature, such as active labor market policies, educational policies, employment protection legislation, healthcare, private pension programs and work-family policies. It illuminates why business groups have responded so very differently to demands for increased social protection against different labor market risks in different countries and over time. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of comparative welfare, political science, sociology, social policy studies, comparative political economy and welfare history. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license: https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780815377917_oachapter4.pdf

The absurdity of bureaucracy offers a humorous ethnographic account of policy implementation set in contemporary Danish bureaucracy. Taking the reader deep into the hallways of governmental administration and municipal caseworkers' offices, the book sets out to explore what characterizes policy implementation as a mode of human agency. Using the notions of absurdity and sense-making as lenses through which to explore the dynamic relationship between a policy and its effects, the book reclaims 'implementation studies' for the qualitative sciences and emphasizes the existential dilemma that any policymaker and implementer must confront. Following step-by-step the planning and implementation of the randomized controlled trial, Active - Back Sooner, the book sets out to show that 'going wrong' is not a question of implementation failure but is in fact the only way in which implementation may happen. -- .

This book mounts a critique of current health economics and provides a better way of looking at the economics of health and health care. It argues that health economics has been too dominated by the economics of health care and has largely ignored the impact of poverty, inequality, poor housing, and lack of education on health. It is suggested that some of the structural issues of economies, particularly the individualism of neo liberalism which is becoming more and more pervasive across the globe, need to be addressed in health economics.
The author instead proposes a form of collective decision making through communitarianism, placing value on participation in public life and on institutions, such as health care. It is envisaged this form of decision making can be used at the local, national or global levels. For the last, this would mean a major revamp of global institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Examples of the impact of the new paradigm on health policy in general but also more specifically on priority setting and equity are included.

A collection of essays by economists and political scientists, each with an interest in Austrian school arguments, Basic Income and the Free Market confronts the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) concept. It outlines Austrian arguments for and against the BIG; critiques of Austrian theory from market-socialist and post-Keynesian perspectives that lead to defense of the BIG; critiques of BIG that consider Austrian and other heterodox theory; comparisons of the policy to proposals by others, such as Milton Friedman's negative income tax; pragmatic arguments for the policy; and proposals which discuss complex systems theory (which is embraced by 'left' and 'right' thinkers alike) and its relationship to Hayek's spontaneous order. The collection opens a dialog between Austrian and other heterodox economists as well as between 'classical liberal, ' libertarian, and left-leaning or socialist political scientists and policymakers. The authors discuss whether the BIG could offer an alternative to both laissez-faire and existing welfare systems in developed countries, which are often criticized by both advocates and critics of laissez-faire, opening a constructive dialog in policy discussion. Included in this discussion is a systematic critique of pure laissez-faire interpretations of Austrian theory, and the analysis of the addition of a BIG to pure laissez-faire in the place of existing interventionist systems. Proposals making this case form the first section, followed by rebuttals and proposals against the policy, and rejoinders.

Many people see government involvement in family policy as a response to popular concerns that the American family is in a state of crisis. One of the primary concerns with "fragile" families (one parent a" usually mother) is economic: Poverty rates for single mothers are several times that of two-parent families. Economic deprivation while growing up has been linked to poor physical health, reduced intellectual ability and academic achievement.

Some social sciences contend that marriage is the solution to many of the problems associated with single-parent families. Other experts believe that government programs designed to raise marriage rates may cause more problems than they solve ( i.e. domestic violence, divorce, etc.).

The proposed volume will explore issues related to fragile families from many different perspectives on the causes and consequences of this issue. This book is divided up into sections covering legal and theoretical perspectives, causes and consequences of offspring wellbeing, and the aspect of fathera (TM)s importance to the "fragile families."

During the last decade, many European countries introduced extensive reforms to the way that income protection and activation programmes for the unemployed are implemented and delivered. This book analyzes and compares these reforms in nine European countries, focusing on the reforms programmes themselves, as well as on their effects.

This book attributes American poverty to consequences 19th Century social welfare policies within an economy stretching to meet its 21st Century economic potential, arguing that American poverty persists as economic and political structures have moved into the world of fiscal planning but social welfare remains in its Depression-era structure.

Originally published in 1968, Social Security: Beveridge and After concentrates on the development of social security in the U.K. since the Beveridge report. The book looks at the system of Social Security, since it was unified with the Ministry of Social Security, and looks at the extent to which the original proposals of Lord Beveridge have been modified over time. The book adopts an interesting, functional approach to addressing the acts and regulations that have been implemented, and clearly brings out the essential principles and elements in this complicated field of social provision.

Numerous important issues arise in relation to the health of, and healthcare for (and by), migrants. Much commentary on the migrant crisis and healthcare has focused on the allocation of resources, with less discussion of the needs of, and provision for, migrants. Presenting a comparative perspective on the UK and Germany, this volume increases knowledge of a broad spectrum of challenges in healthcare provision for migrants. 'Migration' is deliberately understood in its broadest sense and includes not only migrant patients but also migrant healthcare professionals. The book's content is diverse, with insights from healthcare ethics, healthcare law, along with clinical perspectives as well as perspectives from the social sciences. The collection provides normative reflections on current issues, and presents data from empirical studies. By informing researchers, politicians and healthcare practitioners about approaches to challenges arising in healthcare provision for migrants, the collection seeks to inform the development of adequate and ethically appropriate strategies.