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 volume contains research on how we measure poverty, inequality and welfare and how we use such measurements to devise policies to deliver social mobility. It contains ten papers, some of which were presented at the third meeting of The Theory and Empirics of Poverty, Inequality and Mobility at Queen Mary University of London, London, October 2016. The volume begins with theoretical issues at the frontier of the literature. Three papers discuss the impact of social welfare policies on poverty measurement, and with innovations on the measurement of relative bipolarisation. Two papers address the conceptualisation of multidimensional poverty by incorporating inequality within the poor, and that of chronic poverty for time dependent analyses, with applications to India and Haiti, and Ethiopia respectively. The second half of the volume consists of empirical contributions, using novel techniques and datasets to investigate the dynamics of poverty and welfare. These studies track the dynamics of poverty using unique datasets for China, the Caucasus and Italy. The volume concludes with investigations about within-household inequalities between siblings due to the unequal effects of conditional cash transfers in Cambodia and a cross-country study on the effect of historical income inequality on entrepreneurship in developing countries.

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 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.

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 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.

This insightful book explores the role of both the family and the state in shaping the living conditions of the young and old in Europe. It provides a comparative theoretical and empirical analysis of age-related policies and welfare arrangements in Germany, France, Italy and Sweden. By combining institutional data on changes in public policies with longitudinal micro-data on living arrangements and informal support patterns in families, the authors are able to demonstrate the huge diversity in the organization of intergenerational relations and the changes that have occurred since the early 1990s. Age-specific differences in attitudes towards current social policy issues are also explored. The key finding is that intergenerational bonds of solidarity remain robust, meaning predictions of a potential conflict between the generations are vastly exaggerated. Providing up-to-date information on the perception of public policies and generational conflicts in different welfare states, this book is a must read for researchers in the field of comparative social policy and intergenerational relations. It will also benefit academics in sociology and political science, as well as policy-makers and consultants.

The challenge of meeting the growing cost of welfare is one of the most pressing issues facing governments of our time. Glennerster's authoritative Understanding the cost of welfare assesses what welfare costs and how it is funded sector-by-sector. The book is written in a clear, accessible style, ideally suited to both teaching and study, and the general reader. This substantially revised third edition includes: * Discussion of the many funding issues now facing welfare states, such as demographic change, tax resistance, slow growth and austerity programmes * The theory and practice of devolved tax and budgetary responsibilities between UK nations and in comparison with other countries * New chapters on pensions and post-16 education * More regular and extensive comparative analysis Divided into 3 sections, covering Principles, Service funding, and The Future, the book Includes questions for discussion and suggestions for further reading, making it an easy-to-use, essential resource for both undergraduate and post-graduate students of Social Policy, Sociology, Politics and Public Administration.

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 essays in this series offer fresh theoretical and methodological insights into the key issues in the field of economic inequality. The content is comprised of highly topical subject matter with key researchers in the field contributing.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

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

An authoritative and unflinching analysis of recent approaches to social policy and their outcomes following the financial crisis, with particular focus on poverty and inequality. Through a detailed look at spending, outputs and outcomes the book offers a unique appraisal of Labour and the coalition's impact as well as an insightful assessment of future directions.

Created during and after the Second World War, the British Welfare State seemed to promise welfare for all, but, in its original form, excluded millions of disabled people. This book examines attempts in the subsequent three decades to reverse this exclusion. It is the first to contextualise disability historically in the welfare state and under each government of the period. It looks at how disability policy and perceptions were slow to change as a welfare issue, which is very timely in today's climate of austerity. It also provides the first major analysis of the Disablement Income Group, one of the most powerful pressure groups in the period and the 1972 Thalidomide campaign and its effect on the Heath government. Given the recent emergence of the history of disability in Britain as a major area of research, the book will be ideal for academics, students and activists seeking a better understanding of the topic.

An authoritative and unflinching analysis of recent approaches to social policy and their outcomes following the financial crisis, with particular focus on poverty and inequality. Through a detailed look at spending, outputs and outcomes the book offers a unique appraisal of Labour and the coalition's impact as well as an insightful assessment of future directions.

What is welfare? Why is it a key part of the 'common good' for all? And how should we go about providing it? Pete Alcock, a well-respected expert, explains the challenges that collective welfare faces, and explores the complexities involved in delivering it, including debates about who benefits from welfare and how and where it is delivered. His primary focus is on the UK, including the problems of poverty and inequality, and how recent political and economic changes have undermined public investment; but he also draws on international examples from Europe and other OECD countries, such as the impact of private health care in the USA. Why we need welfare is a call for new forms of collective action to meet welfare needs in the 21st century. It offers a fresh perspective on the key issues involved, and is a great introduction to this important and topical debate.

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.

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.

Has the modern Conservative Party developed a distinctive approach to the post-war welfare state? In exploring this question, this accessible book takes an authoritative look at Conservative Party policy and practice in the modern era. The book's time-defined content and broad historical thread make it a valuable resource for academics and students in social policy and politics as well as social history.

For anyone new to the subject of Citizen's Income, or who wants to introduce friends, colleagues or relatives to the idea, this valuable guide will be essential reading. Drawing on arguments detailed in Money for everyone (Policy Press, 2013), it offers a convincing case for a Citizen's Income and a much needed resource for all interested in the future of welfare in the UK.

There is a need to understand the Italian welfare state, but as yet it has received little academic research attention. The Italian Welfare State in a European Perspective is the first book to explore the evolution of Italy's welfare state in the decades since the 'Trente Glorieuses' (1945-75). It offers a rare overview and analysis of the Italian situation based on an in-depth study of the main social policy fields (including education, higher education and taxation policies), a detailed analysis of the connection between policies and their outputs/outcomes and a comparative perspective framing the Italian case within the European context. This is the first English-language book to take a comparative look at the Italian welfare state as a whole since the 2008 economic crisis, It will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers, as well as students.

This important book sheds light on the ways in which modern tools of welfare economics can be used to assess the benefits and costs of resource conflicts involving hydropower. The chapters highlight key methodological issues in this area; ranging from the intersection between cost benefit analysis and behavioral economics, to the value of load balancing services provided by hydropower. The inclusion of insights from expert contributors from both sides of the Atlantic brings a unique and interesting range of viewpoints to the work.Several factors suggest that resource conflicts involving moving water are likely to be even more difficult to resolve today than they have been in the past. The contributors, top scholars in resource economics, consider a variety of issues through the lens of cost benefit analysis. In the first part of the book, they address specific cases and issues from North America and Europe. The book closes with a more general look at the topic. Academics and students interested in applied welfare economics, especially cost benefit analysis and energy economics, along with government officials in the energy environment nexus and private sector analysts will all find much of interest and value in this volume. Contributors include: J. Duffield, F. Forsund, N. Hanley, L. Hjalmarsson, P.-O. Johansson, Y. Ju, B. Kristrom, J. Loomis, E.M. Moore, B. Ranneby, V.K. Smith