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.

Health and Social Justice provides a theoretical framework for health ethics, public policy and law in which Dr Ruger introduces the health capability paradigm, an innovative and unique approach which considers the capability of health as a moral imperative. This book is the culmination of more than a decade and a half of work to develop the health capability paradigm, with a vision of a world where all have the capability to be healthy. This vision is grounded in the Aristotelian view of human flourishing and also Amartya Sen's capability approach. In this new paradigm, not just health care, or even just health alone, but the capability for health itself is a moral imperative, as is ensuring the conditions that allow all individuals the means to achieve central health capabilities. Key tenets of health capability include health agency, shared health governance, where individuals, providers and institutions work together to create a social system enabling all to be healthy, and the use of theorized agreements and shared reasoning to guide social choice and shape health policy and decision-making. This book provides philosophical justification for the direct moral importance of health and the capability for health and follows a norms-based approach to health promotion. It employs a joint scientific and deliberative approach to guide health system development and reform, and the allocation of scarce health resources. The health capability paradigm integrates both proceduralist and consequentialist approaches to justice, and both moral and political legitimacy are critical.

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.

For much of human history, most of the population lived and worked on farms but today, information about livestock is more likely to come from children's books than hands-on experience. When romanticized notions of an agrarian lifestyle meet with the realities of the modern industrial farm, the result is often a plea for a return to antiquated production methods. The result is a brewing controversy between animal activist groups, farmers, and consumers that is currently being played out in ballot boxes, courtrooms, and in the grocery store. Where is one to turn for advice when deciding whether to pay double the price for cage-free eggs, or in determining how to vote on ballot initiates seeking to ban practices such as the use of gestation crates in pork production or battery cage egg production? At present, there is no clear answer. What is missing from the animal welfare debate is an objective approach that can integrate the writings of biologists and philosophers, while providing a sound and logical basis for determining the consequences of farm animal welfare policies. What is missing in the debate? Economics.
This book journeys from the earliest days of animal domestication to modern industrial farms. Delving into questions of ethics and animal sentience, the authors use data from ingenious consumers' experiments conducted with real food, real money, and real animals to compare the costs and benefits of improving animal care. They show how the economic approach to animal welfare raises new questions and ethical conundrums, as well as providing unique and counter-intuitive results.

What do we mean by inequality comparisons? If the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer, the answer might seem easy. But what if the income distribution changes in a complicated way? Can we use mathematical or statistical techniques to simplify the comparison problem in a way that has economic meaning? What does it mean to measure inequality? Is it similar to National Income? Or a price index? Is it enough just to work out the Gini coefficient? Measuring Inequality tackles these questions and examines the underlying principles of inequality measurement and its relation to welfare economics, distributional analysis, and information theory. The book covers modern theoretical developments in inequality analysis, as well as showing how the way we think about inequality today has been shaped by classic contributions in economics and related disciplines. Formal results and detailed literature discussion are provided in two appendices. The principal points are illustrated in the main text, using examples from US and UK data, as well as other data sources, and associated web materials provide hands-on learning. Measuring Inequality is designed to appeal to both undergraduate and post-graduate students, and academic economists. Its emphasis on practical application means that it will also be useful to policy analysts and advisors.

The ongoing privatization of pensions--the shift from state to private responsibility for old age retirement income--raises fundamental issues of social and participatory rights. The recent financial market crisis makes the problematic nature of funded private pensions that fall short of expected returns dramatically clear. What have been the experiences in developed multipillar systems? What can be learned for those pensions systems currently under reform?
This edited book compares the varieties of pension governance in ten European countries. Contrasting the experience of developed multipillar systems such as Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland with the recent shift toward private occupational and personal pensions in Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. The country chapters investigate how and why old age income responsibilities are being shifted to employers, unions, and individuals. They describe the changing public and private pension mix, and the particular features of the private occupational and personal pensions.
In particular The Varieties of Pension Governance discusses four major questions: who is covered, what kind of benefits, who pays, and who governs? Three comparative analyses provide an additional value, describing the long-term institutional change from public to multipillar pension systems, the variations in regulation and governance of private pensions, and the consequences for income inequality in old age. This book combines the benefits of a reference work--ten up-to-date country studies of major pension systems in Europe--with three cross-national comparative empirical analyses that provide comprehensive information on important aspects of the reform development, societal governance, and social outcomes of pension systems.

For generations, women have experienced disadvantage in the paid labour market, the devaluation of their unpaid caring roles and multiple constraints on their agency. This book analyses fresh empirical evidence which demonstrates the gendered impacts of the new conditionality regime within Universal Credit. It shows how the regime affects women's unpaid caring roles, their position in the paid labour market and their agency regarding engagement in unpaid care and paid work. Ultimately, it highlights the impacts on the position of low-income women in the UK's social security system and society. Drawing on in-depth interviews with mothers, this book offers a compelling narrative and crucial policy recommendations to improve the gendered impact of Universal Credit and make the social citizenship framework in the UK more inclusive of women.

Globalization and poverty are two of the most pressing contemporary international development issues. Despite the enormous potential of globalization to accelerate economic growth and development, through greater integration into the world economy, the spread and transfer of technology, and the transmission of knowledge, its impact on poverty reduction has been uneven and even marginal in some regions. Both the prevalence and depth of poverty in many parts of the developing world remain unacceptably high.
This volume presents thirteen studies selected from the three regional conferences organized under the auspices of UNU-WIDER. They illustrate the differential effects of globalization on growth, inequality, and poverty in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Distinct processes of institutional and socio-political change, as well as significant differences in initial conditions, such as natural resource endowment, the quantity and quality of human capital, institutional framework, and the quality of governance, have had diverse effects on the poor in these regions. Focusing on distinct manifestations of globalization and their affect on poverty, these case studies cover the spectrum from broad macroeconomic regional and country analyses to micro-oriented village studies in each of the three continents. This volume clearly illustrates that the impact of globalization on poverty is extremely context specific, reflecting the heterogeneous and complex nature of the globalization-poverty nexus.

The Handbook of Rational and Social Choice provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice over the past three decades. Drawing on work by economic theorists mainly, but also with contributions from political science, philosophy and psychology, the collection shows how the related areas of decision theory and social choice have developed in their applications and moved well beyond the basic models of expected utility and utilitarian approaches to welfare economics.
Containing twenty-three contributions, in many cases by leading figures in their fields, the handbook shows how the normative foundations of economics have changed dramatically as more general and explicit models of utility and group choice have been developed. This is perhaps the first time these developments have been brought together in a manner that seeks to identify and make accessible the recent themes and developments that have been of particular interest to researchers in recent years. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare but it will also be of interest to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.

Welfare and the Great Recession surveys and analyses welfare consequences in the period following the financial crisis in Europe. It investigates how the burdens of the recession were shared between countries, between different socio-economic groups across Europe, and within individual countries, and offers new evidence that demonstrates the importance of the welfare state and government policies in sheltering populations from serious economic contraction. The first comprehensive study of the Great Recession in Europe that focuses on household level welfare consequences, this edited volume relates financial hardship to institutional characteristics such as welfare regimes, currency regimes, socio-political patterns, affluence levels, public debt, and policy reactions to periods of crisis. It takes into account stimulus versus austerity, the degree of social protection emphasis, the commitment to redistribution, and the significance of activism. Widely comparative, Welfare and the Great Recession combines comparisons of thirty countries with an in-depth study of nine country cases to offer various lessons from the crisis experience in Europe and reflect on welfare futures in a globalized crisis-prone environment.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY licence. The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the landscape of voluntary action. Some volunteering projects had to be paused, while others were delivered in different ways, but across all four UK nations large numbers of people began volunteering for the first time. This book provides an overview of the constraints and opportunities of mobilising voluntary action across the four UK nations during the pandemic. Sector experts and academics examine the divergent voluntary action policy frameworks adopted, the state and non-state supported volunteer responses, the changes in the profile of volunteers and the plans to sustain their involvement. This book addresses the urgent policy and practice need for evidence-based considerations to support recovery from the pandemic and to prepare for future emergencies.

In many European countries, processes of individualisation have contributed to transforming the middle class into a multitude of people, a sort of 'middle mass' with an unstable social identity and radical activism. The different 'worlds' of European welfare states seem progressively less able to manage this new kind of middle-class activism. This book is an essential contribution to ongoing public and academic debates on the unpredictability of middle-class attitudes and on their changing relations with the welfare state. Identifying key trends in the literature, it considers the impact of recent welfare reforms on the needs and preferences of the middle class.

Companies are increasingly championed for their capacity to solve social problems. Yet what happens when such goods as water, education, and health are sold by companies - rather than donated by nonprofits - to the disadvantaged and when the pursuit of mission becomes entangled with the pursuit of profit? In Caring Capitalism, Emily Barman answers these important questions, showing how the meaning of social value in an era of caring capitalism gets mediated by the work of 'value entrepreneurs' and the tools they create to gauge companies' social impact. By shedding light on these pivotal actors and the cultural and material contexts in which they operate, Caring Capitalism accounts for the unexpected consequences of this new vision of the market for the pursuit of social value. Proponents and critics of caring capitalism alike will find the book essential reading.

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.

Systems of social protection can provide crucial assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society, but not all systems are created equally. In Latin America, social policies have historically exhibited large gaps in coverage and high levels of inequality in benefit size. Since the late 1990s, countries in this region have begun to grapple with these challenges, enacting a series of reforms to healthcare, social assistance, and education policy. While some of these initiatives have moved in a universal direction, others have maintained existing segmentation or moved in a regressive direction. Welfare and Party Politics in Latin America explores this variation in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela, finding that the design of previous policies, the intensity of electoral competition, and the character of political parties all influence the nature of contemporary social policy reform in Latin America.

Written by one of the world's leading policy researchers, this book seeks to assess the threat posed to modern welfare states by globalization and demographic change. Bringing together empirical methods, current information from 21 advanced countries, and insights from across the social sciences, Castles distinguishes welfare crisis myths from welfare crisis realities, and presents likely trajectories of welfare state development in coming decades. The book will be essential reading for scholars from a broad range of disciplines, as well as policy-makers in many areas of government.

A timely and incisive look at austerity measures that succeed-and those that don't Fiscal austerity is hugely controversial. Opponents argue that it can trigger downward growth spirals and become self-defeating. Supporters argue that budget deficits have to be tackled aggressively at all times and at all costs. In this masterful book, three of today's leading policy experts cut through the political noise to demonstrate that there is not one type of austerity but many. Looking at thousands of fiscal measures adopted by sixteen advanced economies since the late 1970s, Austerity assesses the relative effectiveness of tax increases and spending cuts at reducing debt. It shows that spending cuts have much smaller costs in terms of output losses than tax increases. Spending cuts can sometimes be associated with output gains in the case of expansionary austerity and are much more successful than tax increases at reducing the growth of debt. The authors also show that austerity is not necessarily the kiss of death for political careers as is often believed, and provide new insights into the recent cases of European austerity after the financial crisis. Bringing needed clarity to one of today's most challenging subjects, Austerity charts a sensible approach based on data analysis rather than ideology.

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. During the consolidation of the welfare state in the 1940s, and its reshaping in the 2010s, the boundaries between the state, voluntary action, the family and the market were called into question. This interdisciplinary book explores the impact of these 'transformational moments' on the role, position and contribution of voluntary action to social welfare. It considers how different narratives have been constructed, articulated and contested by public, political and voluntary sector actors, making comparisons within and across the 1940s and 2010s. With a unique analysis of recent and historical material, this important book illuminates contemporary debates about voluntary action and welfare.

Now it its fourth edition, this textbook has been completely revised to examine the current state of housing policy in the UK. Exploring developments in housing policy made since Labour's 1997 electoral victory, the book addresses current issues included: the 'brownfield versus greenfield' debate; the phasing out of renovation grants; the transfer of local authority housing to registered social landlords; boom, slump and boom in the owner-occupied sector.
Other topics addressed range from regional policy and housing across the UK, to social exclusion, community care and homelessness.

One of the world's most engaging political scientists presents a provocative examination of the present impasse of European integration-which cannot go forward to become a democratic state, and which cannot return to the conditions of the sovereign nation state. It develops an approach that emphasizes the complementarity, rather than the conflict, between national and European governing capabilities.

The ongoing social crises and moral conflicts evident in global social policy debates are addressed in this timely volume. Leading interdisciplinary scholars focus on the 'social' of social policy, which is increasingly conceived in a globalised form, as new international agreements and global goals engender social struggles. They tackle pressing 'social questions', many of which have been exacerbated by COVID-19, including growing inequality, changing world population, ageing societies, migration and intersectional disadvantage. This ground-breaking volume critically engages with contested conceptions of the social which are increasingly deployed by international institutions and policy makers. Focusing on social sustainability, social cohesion, social justice, social wellbeing and social progress this text is even more crucial as policy makers look to accelerate socially sustainable solutions to the world's biggest challenges.

Demographic changes have been a major force in bringing population and family issues on to the political agenda. The decline in fertility, the increase in divorce rates and lone-parenthood, and the entry of women into the labour force have all reduced the relevance of systems of state support aimed at traditional families. Dr Gauthier examines the changes that have affected families over the past 100 years, and the various policies that have been adopted by the governments of twenty-two industrialized countries in response to these changes, assembling arguments from demography, sociology, and economics to explain population policies, their origins and aims.

In this book, the author provides an analysis which spans the whole field from bricks and mortar to the impact of housing policy on health, care, crime, education and the economy as a whole. Practical insight into housing from a number of perspectives can be gained: economic, financial and political; social policy and welfare; construction and planning; environment and public health; and residents and communities.

A careful and precise presentation, from leading experts in the field, of the development of the welfare state in the UK. Looking at both historical processes and the welfare systems current state, these excellent contributors provide an authoritative analysis, packed with data. The United Kingdom had one of the oldest and most extensive welfare states in the world. The economic crisis of 1976 and eighteen years of Conservative Government have tested the welfare system to its very foundations. Much changed, yet much remained the same after two decades. Did the Conservative Government dismember the welfare state or reform it? Did the changes of the past twenty years make any difference and to whom? This second edition of the widely-acclaimed State of Welfare reviews the changing fate of social policy in the years since 1974. It details changes in policy but also charts trends in spending in real terms over the period and analyses the outcomes of spending on education, the National Health Service, the personal social services, housing and social security. There is no other consistent published time series of spending on these services over this period in real and volume terms. The General Household Survey is re-analysed to produce a common source of information on the way changes in these services have affected families. Other available sources of information on the impact of past government reforms are drawn upon to provide a comprehensive account. This completely revised edition uses the successful framework adopted in the first volume to bring the story up to the end of the Conservative Administration with the latest available expenditure figures. This adds nearly a decade to the account detailed in the first edition - a decade of remarkable change. The book is clearly structured, with core chapters covering each of the five service areas of education, health, housing, personal social services and social security, and a concluding chapter summarising the key findings of previous chapters to provide an overview of the current state of welfare. Each chapter is then subdivided, with sections on the ultimate aims of welfare policy in the particular area covered, public expenditure, the outputs for that spending, and the outcomes in terms of indicators of individual welfare. Each chapter is summarised in an in brief section at the end, and has a further reading list. Illustrated with approximately 150 figures and tables, the book presents a substantial amount of quantitative information (much of which comes from Local and Central Government sources) in accessible formats. The book contains a substantial bibliography, including many government papers as well as published books and journal articles. The book can therefore be used as a bibliographical database, besides functioning as a textbook. The State of Welfare functions as an ideal text for public economics students, or those studying social or public policy.