This text consists of a debate between a political theorist and an economist on decision making in housing. Each author develops a normative argument linking theoretical and policy analyses to establish the abilities of the state and individuals to determine housing outcomes. The issues of redistribution and choice are seen as crucial to this debate. Following these initial contributions, the authors engage with each other on specific proposals for the reform of housing policy in the UK.

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.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This book assesses how the practice of contracting-out public employment services via competitive tendering and Payment-by-Results is transforming welfare-to-work in Ireland. It offers Ireland's introduction of a welfare-to-work market as a case study that speaks to wider international debates in social and public policy about the role of market governance in intensifying the turn towards more regulatory and conditional welfare models on the ground. It draws on unprecedented access to, and extensive survey and interview research with, frontline employment services staff, combined with in-depth interviews with policy officials, organisational managers and jobseekers participating in activation.

Building on his earlier Praeger work, "Contemporary EconomicS," Rich here examines current and historical, theoretical and practical, notions of welfare economics. Through an in-depth discussion of the theories of Edgeworth, Pareto, and Slutsky, the author analyzes how the present approach to welfare economics developed and how it has failed in significant ways to alleviate the problems of poverty and unemployment. Rich then develops a new theory of welfare economics based on the concept of dynamic disequilibrium and designed to respond to present-day economic and social realities. Scholars and students of both economics and public policy will find Rich's work a significant contribution to contemporary debates on welfare policy directions.

Divided into four parts, the volume begins by redefining the problem of welfare economics. In contrast to those who see the problem as simply the redistribution of income, Rich argues that the challenge today is to use our present economic system to absorb welfare recipients and make them productive members of the economy. He argues further that current approaches to the welfare situation are Keynesian and therefore relevant to a different era--that of the Great Depression. In subsequent chapters, Rich develops his theory of contemporary welfare economics, utilizing a welfare utility function and incorporating the components of government, industry, and labor. Designed to make the economy more efficient without the redistribution of income, Rich's proposals include making welfare payments contingent upon training and applying training to the needs of the business sector. Only by employing a theory more rooted in contemporary realities, Rich argues, can we ultimately remove the heavy burden of welfare so detrimental to large segments of society.

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.

The essential message of the 'two regimes' model is that the social politics of fatherhood have taken on a global significance and that the USA and Sweden represent two ends of an international continuum of ways of thinking about fatherhood. The key selling points of the two regimes model are its topicality, originality, its global appeal, and its particularised appeal to readers in the USA, the Nordic countries, Great Britain, Ireland, the European Union, Japan and China. The book offers students a comparative analytical framework and new insights into why some welfare states have 'father-friendly' social policies and others do not. The book makes an original contribution to the growing fields of welfare regime and gender studies by linking the epochal decline of patriarchal fatherhood to welfare state expansion over the course of the twentieth century and it raises new questions about the legitimacy of religiously inspired neo-patriarchy. -- .

The papers in Measurement of Poverty, Deprivation, and Social Exclusion represent the most current research on poverty, deprivation, and income mobility. They illustrate the multidimensionality of poverty that is difficult to capture in any one measure. The volume presents state-of-the-art research that is relevant to poverty academics globally. The papers use a variety of methods that measure the persistence of poverty over time and cover numerous countries and circumstances. A selection of papers focus on single countries while others include comparisons of countries. The volume begins with a set of papers that examine particular groups that are most vulnerable to poverty and deprivation in a variety of places. These include measuring the persistence of poverty of immigrant children in Scandinavian countries. Finally the volume concludes with papers that analyze the relationships of two or more measures together to further elucidate what we know if we have only one measure of poverty.

Research on Economic Inequality, volume 26, primarily contains papers presented at the 8th Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) meeting. The papers cover such topics as the effect of inheritance taxation on the "pre-distribution" of income, and tax progressivity under alternative inequality definitions. Other papers address the evolution of wealth inequality (Piketty's "r-g"), the decomposition of the determinants of wage bi-polarization, a multidimensional analysis of food insecurity in Israel, and the "paradox of progress" (educational) in Latin America. Three papers address the intergenerational transmission of inequality, two of which focus on Europe and one which considers a wide variety of countries. The final two papers explore inequality (mis) perceptions and the influence of the political structure on stated inequality preferences.

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.

In this unique and pathbreaking book, David Reisman examines the relatively new phenomenon of health travel. He presents a multidisciplinary account of the way in which lower costs, shorter waiting times, different services, and the chance to combine recreational tourism with a check-up or an operation all come together to make medical travel a new industry with the potential to create jobs and wealth, while at the same time giving sick people high-quality care at an affordable price. The book illustrates that it is no longer the case that medical attention must be consumed at home. Patients are travelling to Mexico, India and Thailand for a heart bypass. They are going to Hungary, Poland and Malaysia for dentistry. Doctors are migrating to Britain, the USA and Canada for new challenges. Hospitals are opening subsidiaries in Dubai, the Philippines and Costa Rica to see overseas patients on the spot. Integrating academic perspectives from medicine, tourism, health economics, development studies and public policy, the author concludes that the benefits both to the importing and the exporting nations are considerable, but that there are also some costs. He suggests that the new industry should be regulated and supported in order that it can do its best both for the local population and for the sick people who travel abroad for treatment. This fascinating and highly original book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in areas such as health economics, tourism, social policy, development studies, Asian studies and public policy. It will also prove invaluable to practitioners actively involved in planning and delivering medical attention in the global economic order.

This text seeks to counter the recent vogue for somewhat unsubstantiated speculation about the impact of globalization upon welfare states. Combining both theoretical and empirical analysis it asks 'What is globalization, and how has it been implicated in recent changes to European welfare states?' Covering all the major European welfare systems, it suggests new empirical and theoretical perspectives. Globalization processes exist, but their link with welfare change is complex, and varies both between countries and types of welfare state.

Presents a research in employment policy. This title addresses the reform of the unemployment insurance system.

Rising food prices, climate change, and the ravages of global capitalism have made the poor increasingly vulnerable to economic crises. At the same time, the governments of many developing countries have adopted austerity measures that leave their citizens without a safety net in times of need. This combination poses a potent threat to social and political stability throughout the developing world. How do the poor cope with economic crises when their governments fail to guarantee social welfare? How do societies keep from fracturing under the weight of economic grievances and civil unrest? Outsourcing Welfare argues that the answers to these questions lie with remittances, the hundreds of billions of dollars that international migrants send to their home countries. Remittances are a leading source of income in dozens of developing economies and a critical lifeline that millions of families use to pay for food, healthcare, clothing, and other basics. In the absence of adequate government social protections, remittances insulate poor families from the full pain of economic crises, and in doing so, reduce the severity of grievances that fuel populist anger, civil unrest, and political instability. Through stories from his fieldwork in Mexico and Central America and analyses of data from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, Roy Germano shows how remittances buffer economic shocks, contribute to economic optimism, and dampen the threat of popular discontent during economic crises. Germano argues that remittances perform a social, economic, and political function that is strikingly similar to social spending, and that counting on people to migrate and send money home has become a de facto social welfare policy in many developing countries.

"In Caring for Our Own, Sandra Levitsky has written a moving and perceptive account of the dilemma facing those who provide care for frail family members. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with family caregivers and the social workers that attempt to ameliorate their burden, this book uncovers the complex ideological and political factors that have made long term care the neglected stepchild of the welfare state in the United States."-Jill Quadagno, Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar in Social Gerontology, Florida State University Aging populations and dramatic changes in health care provision, household structure, and women's labor force participation over the last half century have created what many observers have dubbed a "crisis in care": demand for care of the old and infirm is rapidly growing, while the supply of private care within the family is substantially contracting. And yet, despite the well-documented adverse effects of contemporary care dilemmas on the economic security of families, the physical and mental health of family care providers, the bottom line of businesses, and the financial health of existing social welfare programs, American families have demonstrated little inclination for translating their private care problems into political demands for social policy reform. Caring for Our Own inverts an enduring question of social welfare politics. Rather than asking why the American state hasn't responded to unmet social welfare needs by expanding social entitlements, this book asks: Why don't American families view unmet social welfare needs as the basis for demands for new state entitlements? How do traditional beliefs in family responsibility for social welfare persist even in the face of well-documented unmet need? The answer, this book argues, lies in a better understanding of how individuals imagine solutions to the social welfare problems they confront and what prevents new understandings of social welfare provision from developing into political demand for alternative social arrangements. Caring for Our Own considers the powerful ways in which existing social policies shape the political imagination, reinforcing longstanding values about family responsibility, subverting grievances grounded in notions of social responsibility, and in some rare cases, constructing new models of social provision that would transcend existing ideological divisions in American social politics.

While social welfare programs, often inspired by international organizations, are spreading throughout the world, the more far-reaching notion of governmental responsibility for the basic well-being of all members of a political society is not, although it remains a feature of Europe and the former British Commonwealth. The welfare state in the European sense is not simply an administrative arrangement of various measures of social protection but a political project embedded in distinct cultural traditions. Offering the first accessible account in English of the historical development of the European idea of the welfare state, this book reviews the intellectual foundations which underpinned the road towards the European welfare state, formulates some basic concepts for its understanding, and highlights the differences in the underlying structural and philosophical conditions between continental Europe and the English-speaking world.

A New York Times Bestseller A Wall Street Journal Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A New Statesman Book to Read From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row-a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year-and they're still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today's America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.

In the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the United States suffered the most sustained and extensive wave of job destruction since the Great Depression. When families in need sought help from the safety net, however, they found themselves trapped in a system that increasingly tied public assistance to private employment. In The Workfare State, Eva Bertram recounts the compelling history of the evolving social contract from the New Deal to the present to show how a need-based entitlement was replaced with a work-conditioned safety net, heightening the economic vulnerability of many poor families. The Workfare State challenges the conventional understanding of the development of modern public assistance policy. New Deal and Great Society Democrats expanded federal assistance from the 1930s to the 1960s, according to the standard account. After the 1980 election, the tide turned and Republicans ushered in a new conservative era in welfare politics. Bertram argues that the decisive political struggles took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when Southern Democrats in Congress sought to redefine the purposes of public assistance in ways that would preserve their region's political, economic, and racial order. She tells the story of how the South-the region with the nation's highest levels of poverty and inequality and least generous social welfare policies-won the fight to rewrite America's antipoverty policy in the decades between the Great Society and the 1996 welfare reform. Their successes provided the foundation for leaders in both parties to build the contemporary workfare state-just as deindustrialization and global economic competition made low-wage jobs less effective at providing income security and mobility.

This important research literature review discusses some of the most prominent literature in the field of individual choice and economic welfare. It analyses material exploring how economics as a scientific enterprise may inform political decision-making. The premise is explored paradigmatically through different interpretations including utility-individualism in the context of welfare economics, preference-individualism in social choice theory, and choice-individualism in constitutional economics. The review covers the foundational literature as well as contemporary pieces, which have sparked further discussion in the field. This review will be valuable to researchers and scholars alike as well as to all those gravitating towards this fascinating topic.

This book explores the incentives and effects of modern welfare policy, contrasted with outcomes of global basic income pilots in the past seventy years. The author contends that paternalistic and counterproductive eligibility rules in the modern American welfare state violate the human dignity of the poor and make it nearly impossible to escape the "poverty trap." Furthermore, these types of restrictions are absent from expenditures aimed at middle and upper-income households such as mortgage interest deductions and tax-sheltered retirement accounts. Case examples from the author's years as a front-line social worker and interviews with basic income pilot recipients in Ontario, Canada, are woven throughout the book to better illustrate the effects of the current system and the hidden potential of more radical alternatives such as a universal basic income.

This book provides a study of the rise of private sector providers in the welfare state. It compares for-profit firms as providers of hospital services and pensions and investigates the new private actors in social policy provision, whether they become political actors, and the extent of their power in welfare state politics. Focusing on Germany and the UK, the author's analysis includes, amongst others, the surprising role of private sector firms in the National Health Service and the halting integration of financial sector companies in the German pension system. The book develops a novel measure of power resources with which to capture two dimensions of provider power: instrumental and structural resources. This important book sheds new light on the increasingly dominant role of markets in public policy provision by focusing on the supply side of these markets. Readers will learn about the drivers and contents of social policy reform, the interaction between business and politics and the politics of privatization. It will appeal to scholars and practitioners with an interest in public policy, comparative politics, welfare state reform and privatization.

The politics of austerity has seen governments across Europe cut back on welfare provision. As the State retreats, this edited collection explores secular and faith-based grassroots social action in Germany and the United Kingdom that has evolved in response to changing economic policy and expanding needs, from basic items such as food to more complex means to move out of poverty. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and practitioners in several areas of social intervention, the book explores how the conceptualization and constitutive practices of citizenship and community are changing because of the retreat of the State and the challenge of meeting social and material needs, creating new opportunities for local activism. The book provides new ways of thinking about social and political belonging and about the relations between individual, collective, and State responsibility.

Neoliberal-driven austerity has changed the role of the state, public service provision and citizenship. Thriving in today's society is a challenge for communities around the world as governments increasingly promote privatisation, centralised control, individual responsibility and battle with the impacts of Covid19. Co-authored by practitioners and academics and based on case studies of collaborations between civil society and the civic university, this book uses the North East of England as a lens to explore how different communities have responded to changing circumstances. The case studies present examples of actions aiming to create hope and inspiration for communities in challenging times.

This authoritative collection brings together 100 key articles on the subject of the welfare state selected by one of the world's leading experts. The first volume discusses the economic theory and related matters which underpin analysis of the welfare state. Volume II is about income transfers, especially social security benefits and poverty relief. Volume III looks at benefits in kind, particularly health care and education. This important work provides an analytical background to the subject whilst illustrating the vast array of literature available. It will be invaluable to students and professionals alike.

This book is about tax and social policy and how they interact with each other. The impact of taxation as an instrument of social policy is central in influencing redistribution and behaviour. This broad-based edited collection fills a significant gap in both literatures, bringing together disparate debates in this emerging area of analysis. It guides readers through the key interactions of tax and social policies and the central debates and challenges posed by their effect on each other. It examines how analyses might be combined and policy options developed for more effective delivery and impact in both areas.

A uniquely hybrid approach to welfare state policy, ecological sustainability and social transformation, this book explores transformative models of welfare change. Using Ireland as a case study, it addresses the institutional adaptations needed to move towards a sustainable welfare state, and the policy of making such transformation happen. It takes a theoretical and practical approach to implementing an alternative paradigm for welfare in the context of globalisation, climate change, social cohesion, automation, economic and power inequalities, intersectionality, and environmental sustainability, as well as perpetual crisis, including the pandemic.