Social security institutions have been among the most stable post-war social programs around the world. Increasingly, however, these institutions have undergone profound transformation from public risk-pooling systems to individual market-based designs. Why has this 'privatization' occurred? Why, moreover, do some governments enact more radical pension privatizations than others? This book provides a theoretical and empirical account of when and to what degree governments privatize national old-age pension systems. Quantitative cross-national analysis simulates the degree of pension privatization around the world and tests competing hypotheses to explain reform outcomes. In addition, comparative analysis of pension reforms in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay evaluate a causal theory of institutional change. The central argument is that pension privatization emerges from political conflict, rather than from exogenous pressures. The argument is developed around three dimensions: the double bind of globalization, contingent path-dependent processes, and the legislative politics of loss imposition.

Social security institutions have been among the most stable post-war social programs around the world. Increasingly, however, these institutions have undergone profound transformation from public risk-pooling systems to individual market-based designs. Why has this 'privatization' occurred? Why, moreover, do some governments enact more radical pension privatizations than others? This book provides a theoretical and empirical account of when and to what degree governments privatize national old-age pension systems. Quantitative cross-national analysis simulates the degree of pension privatization around the world and tests competing hypotheses to explain reform outcomes. In addition, comparative analysis of pension reforms in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay evaluate a causal theory of institutional change. The central argument is that pension privatization emerges from political conflict, rather than from exogenous pressures. The argument is developed around three dimensions: the double bind of globalization, contingent path-dependent processes, and the legislative politics of loss imposition.

Rental housing subsidy programmes have been an important part of the American welfare system since the 1930s. The Benefits of Subsidized Housing Programs: An Intertemporal Approach is an empirical study of the distributive effects of the entire system of rental housing subsidies for lower-income households based on a national sample. Using the 1977 Annual Housing Survey, Professor Hammond has evaluated the benefits of all federal, state and local government rental housing subsidy programmes taken as a whole across the nation. Additionally, she has estimated the changes in consumption patterns resulting from these programmes and the relationship between household benefit and household income; household size; age, education, sex, and race of the head of the household; and the geographic location of the household.

The poverty rate is one of the most visible ways in which nations measure the economic well-being of their low-income citizens. To gauge whether a person is poor, European states often focus on a person's relative position in the income distribution to measure poverty while the United States looks at a fixed-income threshold that represents a lower relative standing in the overall distribution to gauge. In Europe, low income is perceived as only one aspect of being socially excluded, so that examining other relative dimensions of family and individual welfare is important. This broad emphasis on relative measures of well-being that extend into non-pecuniary aspects of people's lives does not always imply that more people would ultimately be counted as poor. This is particularly true if one must be considered poor in multiple dimensions to be considered poor, in sharp contrast to the American emphasis on income as the sole dimension.
With contributions from the world's foremost authorities on income and social measurement, the book provides detailed discussions of specific issues from a European perspective followed by commentary from American observers. The volume considers (1) current standards of poverty measurement in the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, (2) challenges in extending those measures to account for the value of the provision of in-kind and cash benefits from the government, (3) the interaction of poverty measures with social assistance, (4) non-income but monetary measures of poverty, and (5) multi-dimensional measures of poverty. The result is a definitive reference for poverty researchers and policymakers seeking to disengage politics from measurement.

In spite of recurrent criticism and an impressive production of alternative indicators by scholars and NGOs, GDP remains the central indicator of countries' success. This book revisits the foundations of indicators of social welfare, and critically examines the four main alternatives to GDP that have been proposed: composite indicators, subjective well-being indexes, capabilities (the underlying philosophy of the Human Development Index), and equivalent incomes. Its provocative thesis is that the problem with GDP is not that it uses a monetary metric but that it focuses on a narrow set of aspects of individual lives. It is actually possible to build an alternative, more comprehensive, monetary indicator that takes income as its first benchmark and adds or subtracts corrections that represent the benefit or cost of non-market aspects of individual lives. Such a measure can respect the values and preferences of the people and give as much weight as they do to the non-market dimensions. A further provocative idea is that, in contrast, most of the currently available alternative indicators, including subjective well-being indexes, are not as respectful of people's values because, like GDP, they are too narrow and give specific weights to the various dimensions of life in a more uniform way, without taking account of the diversity of views on life in the population. The popular attraction that such alternative indicators derive from being non-monetary is therefore based on equivocation. Moreover, it is argued in this book that "greening" GDP and relative indicators is not the proper way to incorporate sustainability concerns. Sustainability involves predicting possible future paths, therefore different indicators than those assessing the current situation. While various indicators have been popular (adjusted net savings, ecological footprint), none of them involves the necessary forecasting effort that a proper evaluation of possible futures requires.

This book presents the first comprehensive history of the interplay of public and private provision that made the Swiss 'three-pillar' pension system into a model for the World Bank and other pension reformers during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Through a study of business federations', private pension lobbyists' and insurance companies' archives, Matthieu Leimgruber charts the century-long battle waged over the boundaries of state and private pensions. He shows how a distinctive path towards social provision has laid the foundation for a pension fund industry rivalling that of the United States and the United Kingdom. Through this comparative approach Matthieu Leimgruber is also able to question current assumptions about the strict dichotomy between 'Anglo-Saxon' and 'continental' models of welfare provision. This study will appeal to scholars of twentieth-century European history, economic history, political economy and welfare economics.

The book explores the content and background to Sir Keith Joseph's famous 'cycle of deprivation' speech in 1972, examining his own personality and family background, his concern with 'problem families', and the wider policy context of the early 1970s. With this background, the book explores New Labour's approach to child poverty, initiatives such as Sure Start, the influence of research on inter-generational continuities, and its stance on social exclusion. The author argues that, while earlier writers have acknowledged the intellectual debt that New Labour owed to Joseph, and noted similarities between their policy approaches to child poverty and earlier debates, more recent attempts to tackle social exclusion, by both the Labour and Coalition Governments, mean that these continuities are now more striking than ever before.With a new Preface for the paperback edition, From transmitted deprivation to social exclusion is the only book-length treatment of this important but neglected strand of the history of social policy. It will be of interest to students and researchers working on contemporary history, social policy, political science, public policy, sociology, and public health.

Demographic change and increasingly international markets are putting severe pressure on developed welfare states in the OECD countries. The contributors to this book assess the magnitude of these challenges and discuss in depth, and in concrete terms, what policy options are open to meet them. Looking at public service production, social insurance, tax policy and debt policy, they examine the main costs and benefits associated with an extensive welfare state and ask whether the same objectives can be reached with a welfare regime that is less costly. They also discuss whether the organization of the welfare state is capable of meeting future challenges facing a changing society. This rigorous analysis draws on empirical material from OECD countries with a focus on the Scandinavian countries.

Sick Note shows how the question of 'who is really sick?' has never been straightforward and will continue to perplex the British state. Sick Note is a history of how the British state asked, 'who is really sick?' Tracing medical certification for absence from work from 1948 to 2010, Gareth Millward shows that doctors, employers, employees, politicians, media commentators, and citizens concerned themselves with measuring sickness. At various times, each understood that a signed note from a doctor was not enough to 'prove' whether someone was really sick. Yet, with no better alternative on offer, the sick note survived in practice and in the popular imagination - just like the welfare state itself. Sick Note reveals the interplay between medical, employment, and social security policy. The physical note became an integral part of working and living in Britain, while the term 'sick note' was often deployed rhetorically as a mocking nickname or symbol of Britain's economic and political troubles. Using government policy documents, popular media, internet archives, and contemporary research, Millward covers the evolution of medical certification and the welfare state since the Second World War, demonstrating how sickness and disability policies responded to demographic and economic changes - though not always satisfactorily for administrators or claimants. Moreover, despite the creation of 'the fit note' in 2010, the idea of 'the sick note' has remained. With the specific challenges posed by the global pandemic in the early 2020s, Sick Note shows how the question of 'who is really sick?' has never been straightforward and will continue to perplex the British state.

Using institutional economics, Professors Alston and Ferrie show how paternalism in Southern agriculture helped shape the growth of the American welfare state in the hundred years following the Civil War. It was an integral part of agricultural contracts prior to mechanization. Paternalism involved the exchange of 'good and faithful' labour services for a variety of in-kind services, most notably protection from physical violence. The Southern landed elite valued paternalism because it reduced monitoring costs and turnover. Workers valued paternalism because of the lack of civil rights. In order to maintain the value of paternalism to their workers, the agricultural interests needed to prevent meddling from the federal government, which they accomplished through their disproportionate political power. Only the advent of mechanization and complementary technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s finally reduced the desire of Southern agricultural interests to fight the expansion of federal welfare programmes.

In Entitled to Nothing, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a "public charge," or a burden upon the State, the author shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to "pay back" benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform. Park argues that the notions of "public charge" and "public burden" were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of "disciplining" immigrants. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, Park provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the "public charge" doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, she shows that the concept of "public charge" continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the U.S., and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system.

This book asks why some countries devote the lion's share of their social policy resources to the elderly, while others have a more balanced repertoire of social spending. Far from being the outcome of demands for welfare spending by powerful age-based groups in society, the 'age' of welfare is an unintended consequence of the way that social programs are set up. The way that politicians use welfare state spending to compete for votes, along either programmatic or particularistic lines, locks these early institutional choices into place. So while society is changing - aging, divorcing, moving in and out of the labor force over the life course in new ways - social policies do not evolve to catch up. The result, in occupational welfare states like Italy, the United States, and Japan, is social spending that favors the elderly and leaves working-aged adults and children largely to fend for themselves.

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.

Social security is a difficult subject. The British system is highly complex, and the details change rapidly. This new textbook is an accessible, broadly based introduction which helps readers to make sense of the system in Britain. Including a broad scope of coverage and accessibility, the book plays a dual role as a preface to both the existing texts on social security policy and the guides on social security benefits. It also looks at the operation of social security benefits. How Social Security Works describes benefits in general terms, as well as the relationship to the welfare state and aspects of the sociology of benefits. Clearly and succinctly, the book lays out the aims, structure, delivery of Britain's main benefits system. It outlines the development of the system, considering the history and political dimensions, and includes a thematic discussion of the main types of benefit: national insurance, means tested, non-contributory, universal, and discretionary; and it conside

We are often told that mean welfare is what the public wants. Whether or not that's true, this book encourages us to at least be honest about what that entails. It explores how diverse welfare users navigate the personal and practical hurdles of Australia's so-called social security system, where benefits are deliberately meagre and come with strings attached. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a region of Sydney known for ethnic diversity and socio-economic disadvantage, Emma Mitchell brings her own experience of belonging to a poor family long reliant on welfare to her research. This book shows the different cultural resources that people bring to welfare encounters with a sensitivity and subtlety that are often missing in both sympathetic and cynical accounts of life on welfare.

Imperial Inequalities takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare. In doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe's global empires. The idea of 'imperial inequalities' provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities. This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces. Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world. These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue duree. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities -- .

Prior to the onset of the recent financial crisis, global trends of social security in industrialised societies were indicating a progressive disengagement of the State, in favour of tax-financed measures similar to social assistance, which may fail to ensure a basic standard of living. In this timely book the author, with his life-long experience of international social security, advocates reinstating social insurance by reducing the volume of income redistribution, increasing the transparency of money flows and improving citizen information. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and lecturers, policy makers, social partners, professionals dealing with social security institutions and civil society groups.

In this unique and provocative contribution to the literatures of political science and social policy, ten leading experts question prevailing views that federalism always inhibits the growth of social solidarity. Their comparative study of the evolution of political institutions and welfare states in the six oldest federal states - Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the US - reveals that federalism can facilitate and impede social policy development. Development is contingent on several time-dependent factors, including degree of democratization, type of federalism, and the stage of welfare state development and early distribution of social policy responsibility. The reciprocal nature of the federalism-social policy relationship also becomes apparent: the authors identify a set of important bypass structures within federal systems that have resulted from welfare state growth. In an era of retrenchment and unravelling unitary states, this study suggests that federalism may actually protect the welfare state, and welfare states may enhance national integration.

In this unique and provocative contribution to the literatures of political science and social policy, ten leading experts question prevailing views that federalism always inhibits the growth of social solidarity. Their comparative study of the evolution of political institutions and welfare states in the six oldest federal states - Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the US - reveals that federalism can facilitate and impede social policy development. Development is contingent on several time-dependent factors, including degree of democratization, type of federalism, and the stage of welfare state development and early distribution of social policy responsibility. The reciprocal nature of the federalism-social policy relationship also becomes apparent: the authors identify a set of important bypass structures within federal systems that have resulted from welfare state growth. In an era of retrenchment and unravelling unitary states, this study suggests that federalism may actually protect the welfare state, and welfare states may enhance national integration.

As population aging has become increasingly acute in many countries, the debate over how to reform often creaking public pension systems has gathered momentum. In many cases, this debate has become politicized and the focus on some of the underlying economic issues has been lost. This volume hopes to redress some of this imbalance. It begins by examining the rationale behind why public pension systems were introduced originally - out of fear that individuals do not adequately save for retirement. It then systematically examines different aspects of reforming these systems. It covers the fiscal repercussions of reform, the implications of the baby boom on asset returns in the years ahead, the political economy of the reform process, and finally the risk-sharing implications that are inherent in reform. An important additional goal of this volume is to make thse appers accessible to as wide an audience as possible: students, academics, and policy makers.

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.

The first book to study women's poverty over the life course, this wide-ranging collection focuses on the economic condition of single mothers and single elderly women--while also considering partnered women and immigrants--in eight wealthy but diverse countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In a rich analysis of labor market and social welfare sectors, Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and a team of outstanding international contributors conclude that both living-wage employment and government provision of adequate benefits and services are necessary if lone women are to achieve a socially acceptable living standard. Taken together, the chapters extend a feminist critique of welfare state theories and chart nations' disparate progress against poverty -- probing, for instance, how Sweden emerged a leader in the prevention of women's poverty while the United States continues to lag.
By identifying the social and economic policies that enable women to live independently, Poor Women in Rich Countries provides nothing less than a blueprint for abolishing women's poverty.

This comprehensive case study chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents' grassroots activism. It explores why and how the African-American women residents creatively and effectively engaged in organizing efforts to resist increasing government disinvestment in public housing and the threat of demolition. Through the inspirational voices of the activists, Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall challenge portrayals of public housing residents as passive and alienated victims of despair.

The welfare state is still very much central in people's everyday lives. The welfare state is at the same time contested and debated, and has often been argued to be in a crisis not only in the wake of the financial crisis. Welfare and welfare states used to be a national issue and prerogative. Today welfare and welfare states are influenced by national as well as regional and global decisions. However, nation states play a decisive role influenced by national preferences and ideas, and, in recent years, populism and welfare chauvinism. This book provides an overview of the central concepts through the lenses of the state, market and civil society. It also provides the reader with knowledge on distribution in societies and how this interacts and influences different groups and their position in society. There are also chapters dealing specifically with central sectors in the welfare states such as health, long-term care and education. The book uses a comparative approach as this better enables one to understand one's own country's welfare, as well as helping to underline and see the linkages to the impact of global and regional issues on welfare states and their development. Finally, the book presents challenges and future perspectives for welfare states and their development. The book's focus on core concepts and the variety of international welfare state regimes and mechanisms for delivering social policy provides a much-needed introduction to the rapidly changing concept of welfare for students on social policy, social studies, sociology and politics courses.

Amartya Sen has made deep and lasting contributions to the academic disciplines of economics, philosophy, and the social sciences more broadly. He has engaged in policy dialogue and public debate, advancing the cause of a human development focused policy agenda, and a tolerant and democratic polity. This argumentative Indian has made the case for the poorest of the poor, and for plurality in cultural perspective. It is not surprising that he has won the highest awards, ranging from the Nobel Prize in Economics to the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. This public recognition has gone hand in hand with the affection and admiration that Amartya's friends and students hold for him. This volume of essays, written in honor of his 75th birthday by his students and peers, covers the range of contributions that Sen has made to knowledge. They are written by some of the world's leading economists, philosophers and social scientists, and address topics such as ethics, welfare economics, poverty, gender, human development, society and politics. This first volume covers the topics of Ethics, Normative Economics and Welfare; Agency, Aggregation and Social Choice; Poverty, Capabilities and Measurement; and Identity, Collective Action and Public Economics. It is a fitting tribute to Sen's own contributions to the discourse on Ethics, Welfare and Measurement. Contributors include: Sabina Alkire, Paul Anand, Sudhir Anand, Kwame Anthony Appiah, A. B. Atkinson, Walter Bossert, Francois Bourguignon, John Broome, Satya R. Chakravarty, Rajat Deb, Bhaskar Dutta, James E. Foster, Wulf Gaertner, Indranil K. Ghosh, Peter Hammond, Christopher Handy, Christopher Harris, Satish K. Jain, Isaac Levi, Oliver Linton, S. R. Osmani, Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Edmund S. Phelps, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Martin Ravallion, Kevin Roberts, Ingrid Robeyns, Maurice Salles, Cristina Santos, T. M. Scanlon, Arjun Sengupta, Tae Kun Seo, Anthony Shorrocks , Ron Smith, Joseph E. Stiglitz, S. Subramanian, Kotaro Suzumura, Alain Trannoy, Guanghua Wan, John A. Weymark, and Yongsheng Xu.