Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. "Portfolios of the Poor" is the first book to systematically explain how the poor find solutions to their everyday financial problems.

The authors conducted year-long interviews with impoverished villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion."

Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, "Portfolios of the Poor" will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.

This book provides practitioners with the foundations onto which they can build their own understanding and practice within housing. It is based on two fundamental principles: the importance of homes becoming enabling environments, and promoting user centred services. The authors argue that occupational therapists working in the distinct context of housing require additional background knowledge and professional skills to those used within healthcare settings. The book explores a broad range of theory bases and developing practice within the area of occupational therapy in housing and presents a vast array of knowledge, research and experience. It is written by occupational therapists working as practitioners, educators and managers, alongside academics in the social policy and disability issues.

More than 25 percent of our marriages end in the tragedy of divorce, and over 72 percent of all teenage marriages terminate in the courtroom. An undetermined number of young people are so disillusioned with marriage that it is no longer even a desirable option for them, and for many, marriage is really nothing more than an "armed truce." What are the reasons? Is there an answer? William McRae feels that most couples enter into marriage unprepared. Their expectations are unrealistic, their roles are undeveloped, their responsibilities are unknown, and their goals are undetermined. Because of this, every couple married by Pastor McRae must be willing to participate in a premarriage study program. The material that has been developed and used over these years is essentially the content of this book.

With welfare to work programmes under intense scrutiny, this book reviews a wide range of existing and future policies across Europe. Seventeen contributors provide case studies and legal, sociological and philosophical perspectives from around the continent, building a rich picture of welfare to work policies and their impact. They show how many schemes do not adequately address social rights and lived experiences, and consider alternatives based on theories of non-domination. For anyone interested in the justice of welfare to work, this book is an important step along the path towards more fair and adequate legislation.

The European welfare systems, established after the Second World War, have been under sustained attack since the late 1970s from the neoliberal drive towards a small state and from the market as the foremost instrument for the efficient allocation of scarce resources. After the 2008 financial crash, Europe's high tax and generous benefits welfare states were, once again, blamed for economic stagnation and political immobilism. If anything, however, the long decade of the Great Recession proved that the welfare state remained a fundamental asset in hard times, stabilizing the economy, protecting households and individuals from poverty, reconciling gendered work and family life, while improving the skills and competences needed in Europe's knowledge economy and ageing society. Finally, the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has, unsuprisingly, brought back into the limelight the productive role of welfare systems in guaranteeing basic security, human capabilities, economic opportunities, and democratic freedoms. In this important contribution, Anton Hemerijck and Robin Huguenot-Noel examine the nature of European welfare provision and the untruths that surround it. They evaluate the impact of the austerity measures that followed the Great Recession, and consider its future design to better equip European societies to face social change, from global competition to accelerated demographic ageing, the digitalization of work and climate change.

The European welfare systems, established after the Second World War, have been under sustained attack since the late 1970s from the neoliberal drive towards a small state and from the market as the foremost instrument for the efficient allocation of scarce resources. After the 2008 financial crash, Europe's high tax and generous benefits welfare states were, once again, blamed for economic stagnation and political immobilism. If anything, however, the long decade of the Great Recession proved that the welfare state remained a fundamental asset in hard times, stabilizing the economy, protecting households and individuals from poverty, reconciling gendered work and family life, while improving the skills and competences needed in Europe's knowledge economy and ageing society. Finally, the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has, unsuprisingly, brought back into the limelight the productive role of welfare systems in guaranteeing basic security, human capabilities, economic opportunities, and democratic freedoms. In this important contribution, Anton Hemerijck and Robin Huguenot-Noel examine the nature of European welfare provision and the untruths that surround it. They evaluate the impact of the austerity measures that followed the Great Recession, and consider its future design to better equip European societies to face social change, from global competition to accelerated demographic ageing, the digitalization of work and climate change.

Richard Titmuss (1907-1973) was a pioneer in the field of social administration (now social policy) and this reissued classic contains a selection of his most famous writing on social issues. It covers subjects ranging from the position of women in society, changes in family life, and the social effects of industrialisation, to the problems of an ageing population, pensions, social security and taxation policy, and the development of the national health service. This collection contains one of Titmuss's most original contributions to the analysis of welfare policy - his reflections on 'The social division of welfare'. The book stands the test of time as representative of his thinking, and as an inspiration to those who wrestle with the complex issues of our welfare state.

Experiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing, have led to the establishing of shared and self-managed housing areas. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds "from below". Here, Penny Travlou and Stavros Stavridis trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define housing economies. Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture. The authors explore a variety of urban contexts through global case studies from across the Global North and South, in search of concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.

Both "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrats" have taken on a pejorative hue over the years, but does the problem lie with those on the "street-level" - those organizations and people the public deals with directly - or is it in how they are managed? Norma Riccucci knows that management matters, and she addresses a critical gap in the understanding of public policy by uniquely focusing on the effects of public management on street-level bureaucrats. How Management Matters examines not only how but where public management matters in government organizations. Looking at the 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or PRWORA), Riccucci examines the law's effectiveness in changing the work functions and behaviors of street-level welfare workers from the role of simply determining eligibility of clients to actually helping their clients find work. She investigates the significant role of these workers in the implementation of welfare reform, the role of public management in changing the system of welfare under the reform law, and management's impact on results - in this case ensuring the delivery of welfare benefits and services to eligible clients. Over a period of two years, Riccucci traveled specifically to eleven different cities and, from interviews and a large national survey, she gathered quantitative results from cities in such states as New York, Texas, Michigan, and Georgia, that were selected because of their range of policies, administrative structures, and political cultures. General welfare data for all fifty states is included in this rigorous analysis, demonstrating to all with an interest in any field of public administration or public policy that management does indeed matter.

Recent policies have replaced direct government funding for teaching with fees paid by students. As well as saddling graduates with enormous debt, satisfaction rates are low, a high proportion of graduates are in non-graduate jobs, and public debt from unpaid loans is rocketing. This timely and challenging analysis combines theoretical and data analysis and insights gained from running a university, to give robust new policy proposals: lower fees; reintroduce maintenance awards; impose student number caps; maintain taxpayer funding; cancel the TEF; re-build the external examiner system; restructure the contingent-repayment loan scheme; and establish different roles for different types of institutions, to encourage excellence and ultimately benefit society.

At a time when austerity is claimed by some to be the only answer to today's economic woes, a close look at the best practices used in Scandinavia is edifying. Decision makers everywhere dispose of ample evidence showing that social determinants have an impact on health and wellbeing. Yet governments develop policies that diverge enormously. Scandinavian countries are often cited as models for their egalitarian social and health policies but are also known to have thriving economies where the gap dividing rich from poor is smaller than elsewhere. Despite quasi mythic status, these policies aimed to combat inequalities in health are neither well known or understood. Policies discussed in Scandinavian Common Sense include education, housing, conciliation of work and family life, daycare, sustainable development and more. For these policies to be part of political debate, be it in Quebec, Canada, the United States or elsewhere, they must be in the public domain. That is the purpose of this book.

The turn towards a Social Investment approach to welfare implies deploying resources to enhance human capital and mobilise the productive potential of citizens, starting in early childhood. This edited collection brings regional and local realities to the forefront of social investment debates by showcasing successes, challenges and setbacks of Social Investment policies and services from ten European countries: Italy, UK, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. It provides practical, accessible illustrations of good practice, routes to success, and lessons learned. The book is informed throughout by engagement with service users and local communities, and features many previously unheard voices including front-line workers, local decision makers, volunteers and beneficiaries.

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.

The turn of the century has seen a proliferation of concepts and models in relation to the development of new residential environments in the UK. "Housing Transformations "describes these concepts and models and accounts for their emergence at the present time, at the conjuncture of a particular set of cultural, social, economic and political circumstances. Franklin explains the variety and nature of the built form, and tries to achieve a greater insight into how and why we build places and dwell in spaces that are at once contradictory, confining, liberating and illuminating. The shaping and re-shaping of the built environment derives from the intersection of locality and timing: the structural context, the mediating role of institutions and organizations, and the actions and proclivities of individuals. The author includes numerous case studies to show the background to provide specific examples of contemporary conditions. Housing Transformations will appeal to all those in the built environmentdisciplines, as well as to those in other social science fields with an interest in housing and residential environments.

As the state withdraws from welfare provision, the mixed economy of welfare - involving private, voluntary and informal sectors - has become ever more important. This second edition of Powell's acclaimed textbook on the subject brings together a wealth of respected contributors. New features of this revised edition include: * An updated perspective on the mixed economy of welfare (MEW) and social division of welfare (SDW) in the context of UK Coalition and Conservative governments * A conceptual framework that links the MEW and SDW with debates on topics of major current interest such as 'Open Public Services', 'Big Society', Any Qualified Provider', Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and 'Public Private Partnerships' (PPP) Containing helpful features such as summaries, questions for discussion, further reading suggestions and electronic resources, this will be a valuable introductory resource for students of social policy, social welfare and social work at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

This book is Volume I of a two-volume set on antitrust policy, analyzing the economic efficiency and moral desirability of various tests for antitrust legality, including those promulgated by US and EU antitrust law. The overall study consists of three parts. Part I (Chapters 1-8) introduces readers to the economic, moral, and legal concepts that play important roles in antitrust-policy analysis. Part II (Chapters 9-16) analyzes the impacts of eight types of conduct covered by antitrust policy and various possible government responses to such conduct in terms of economic efficiency, the securing of liberal moral rights, and the instantiation of various utilitarian, non-utilitarian-egalitarian, and mixed conceptions of the moral good. Part III (Chapters 17-18) provides detailed information on US antitrust law and EU competition law, and compares the extent to which-when correctly interpreted and applied-these two bodies of law could ensure economic efficiency, protect liberal moral rights, and instantiate various morally defensible conceptions of the moral good. This first volume contains Part I and the first two chapters of Part II of the overall study-the two chapters that focus on oligopolistic and predatory conduct of all kinds, respectively. The book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students of economics and law who are interested in welfare economics, antitrust legality and the General Theory of the Second Best.

Social policy is often constructed and implemented by people who have little experience of its impact as a service user, but there has been a growing interest in greater public, patient and service user involvement in social policy as both political activity and academic discipline. Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision. A companion volume to Peter Beresford's bestselling All our welfare, it introduces the voices of different groups of service users, starting from their lived experience. With an impressive list of contributors, this important volume fills a gap in looking at social policy using participatory and inclusive approaches and the use of experiential knowledge in its construction. It will challenge traditional state and market-led approaches to welfare.

An evaluation of the most enduring privatisation of the Thatcher era &#8230;</i><br><p>Written in an accessible style, this is a key reference for students and researchers in housing and planning; geography; and social policy.<br><p>The book analyses the operation and impact of the right to buy policy (RTB). It includes a critique of the Housing Act and the 2001 Housing (Scotland) Act. The enactment of these changes under a Labour government affirms the continuance of the RTB. The authors take stock of its profound effect on housing policy, reversing the growth in social housing developed over the twentieth century, transforming the nation's tenure structure and revolutionising the UK housing system. <br><p>The Right to Buy: analysis and evaluation of a housing policy begins with an examination of the policy background to the establishment of the RTB and the main features of the legislation. This is followed by chapters that review its take-up and the pattern of sales and their impact on social housing; a chapter examining the financial aspects of the RTB from the viewpoints of tenants, local authorities and central government; one looking at the impact of the RTB via subsequent re-sales on the open market and on the private rented sector; and a chapter drawing on the information already reviewed to consider the potential of the RTB to create sustainable and diverse communities. In the final chapters the international experience of parallel policies are considered and the future take-up of the RTB is assessed in the light of recent reforms together with alternatives.

The world-scale expansion of markets and market relations ranks among the most transformative developments of our times. We can refer to this process by way of a generic if inelegant term - marketization. This book explores how processes of marketization have registered across East Asia's diverse social landscape and its implications for patterns of welfare and inequality. While there has been great interest in East Asia's economic rise, treatments of welfare and inequality in the region have been largely relegated to specialist literatures. Proceeding from a synthetic critique of political economy, this book places welfare and inequality at the center of a more encompassing comparative approach to political economy that construes countries as dynamic, globally embedded social orders defined and animated by distinctive social relational and institutional features.

The economic demands of an ageing population, coupled with the crisis of public spending pose one of the greatest challenges to social policy in both the East and West. This book focuses on the political economy of pensions, particularly on the interaction between private and state provision. Enterprise and the Welfare State argues that there is more to welfare than simply provision by the state and so the focus of this book is on the welfare society rather than the welfare state. This requires a new system of statistical accounting and a different focus for case studies. A multidisciplinary approach is used to examine the design of the pensions system in nine countries with different institutional welfare mixes. Using a common conceptual framework, it compares and contrasts the goals and realities of the welfare systems in France, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden, where strong occupational pensions are in operation, with the more modest welfare states in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each country case study provides a grounded analysis of the evolution of pension design and traces the impact of the policies on the economic well-being of the aged and the performance of the economy. It offers new data on the level of spending of enterprise based occupational pensions and examines the implications for redistribution resulting from changes in the design of state and occupational pensions. This book will be essential reading for academics, students and public policymakers interested in the economics of welfare, social policy and the future of pension provision.

This book is a timely assessment of 20 years of progress in the field of housing economics and its application to policy and practice. Two decades on from the publication of Duncan Maclennan's influential "Housing Economics, "16 leading housing experts - both academics and policy makers from across the world - now honour Maclennan's contributions.

The chapters here present a contemporary survey of key issues in housing, from urban housing markets and sub-market modelling, to the economics of social housing, the basis for housing planning, economic analysis of neighbourhoods, and the connections between academic work and policy development.

For students, researchers and practitioners in housing, urban economics and social policy, "Housing Economics and Public Policy"

. provides up to date and comprehensive reviews of major areas of the housing economics literature

. sheds light on the economic, social and spatial processes that affect housing

. includes discussion of major areas of cutting edge housing economics research and identifies continuing gaps

. presents a synthesis of housing economics research on both sides of the Atlantic

. assesses the impact of theory on policy and practice

An accessible and entertaining narrative history of the establishment, development and unravelling of the British Welfare State - now fully revised to cover Blair's first term. Lively writing in the style of Peter Hennessy. 'Giant Want. Giant Disease. Giant Ignorance. Giant Squalor. And the insidious Giant Idleness, "which destroys wealth and corrupts men". These were evils to be vanquished by the postwar reconstruction of Britain. Timmins' book recaptures brilliantly the high hopes of the period in which the Welfare State began to be created, and conveys the cranky zeal of its inventor, William Beveridge. The onslaught on the five Giants was the work of five gargantuan programmes that made up the core of Beveridge's Welfare State. These were social security, health, education, housing and a policy of full employment. It is notoriously difficult to write about such subjects and keep the reader reading, but Timmins performs wonders of narrative clarity, anecdote and human detail in a book that finds its chosen level somewhere between Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' and '1066 and All That'...There is something very moving about his rhetoric of transformation and 'The Five Giants' will stir up strong emotions. It is impossible not to respond in personal terms to a book that is a part of so many of our histories, woven into the day-to-day texture of our lives.' Fiona MacCarthy, Observer Beveridge was originally only supposed to sort out the web of insurance services stifling Britain. 'The Five Giants' recounts how his original vision and campaign blossomed enormously to inspire a country at war with the hope that the peace might bring comfort and security for all. The tale hums with the energies and passions of activists, dreamers and ordinary Britons, and seethes with personal vendettas, forced compromises, arguments about money, awkward contradictions, noisy rows and fervent perseverance. Nicholas Timmins, who has seen how the Welfare State works every day for the last two decades, assesses the key personalities, the key problems, the key victories and key defeats in his anecdotal, witty and illuminating study of the Welfare State from the 1940s to the present day.

Should the public play a greater role within the financial system? Decisions about money are a part of our everyday lives. Supporters promote financial inclusion as a way of helping people navigate decisions about money. However, critics fear these policies promote the financialisation of the welfare state and turn citizens into consumers. Presenting a nuanced, critical analysis of financial inclusion, Rajiv Prabhakar brings together the supportive and critical literatures which have, until now, developed in parallel. Addressing key issues including the poverty premium, financial capability and housing, this essential dialogue advances crucial public, academic and policy debates and proposes alternative paths forward.

"This is a big book in every sense: spirit, vision and coverage. It is an impressive piece of scholarship which will become a marker for all studies of housing and related policy issues. This is the first really comprehensive attempt to discuss the history of housing policy issues in the context of the political and economic processes of the last 150 years. It is the best piece of sustained comparative research I know of in the field. It should be of interest to those in various fields of social policy studies as well as housing. Scholars, policy makers and administrators will simply have to read this book. Its breadth and depth of coverage, and the sophistication of its exploration of theoretical issues, confirm Harloe as one of the major social scientists in housing and related areas of study." - Patrick Troy, Australian National University."The People's Home" examines the development of social rented housing over the last hundred years in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the USA. It is based on 15 years of research in these countries and a challenging analysis of the socio-economic and political determinants of social housing provision. Rejecting previous comparative studies, which focus narrowly on the immediate determinants of housing provision, "The People's Home" shows how social housing policies and outcomes have been shaped by broader societal forces - political conflict, economic modernisation, and, most recently, the growth of inequality and social polarization. This important book ends by discussing the implications of this analysis for recent theories of welfare state development, or regimes of 'welfare capitalism', and for the nature of state housing policies in such societies.

"This will be a much debated book among local, state, and national politicians and government officials. It makes a significant contribution in the fields of urban development, environmental planning, comparative urbanization, and U.S.-Mexico border studies. The scholarship is impressive." -- Lawrence A. Herzog, Professor of City Planning, San Diego State University

Today in Texas, over 1500 colonias in the counties along the Mexican border are home to some 400,000 people. Often lacking basic services, such as electricity, water and sewerage, fire protection, policing, schools, and health care, these "irregular" subdivisions offer the only low-cost housing available to the mostly Hispanic working poor.

This book presents the results of a major study of colonias in three transborder metropolitan areas and uncovers the reasons why colonias are spreading so rapidly. Peter Ward compares Texas colonias with their Mexican counterparts, many of which have developed into fully integrated working-class urban communities. He describes how Mexican governments have worked with colonia residents to make physical improvements and upgrade services-a model that Texas policymakers can learn from, Ward asserts. Finally, he concludes with a hard-hitting checklist of public policy initiatives that need to be considered as colonia housing policy enters its second decade in Texas.