The study of welfare capitalism is concerned with a founding question of political economy, namely how capitalism and democracy can be combined. Ever since the publication of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990, the answer was sought in identifying ideal types of welfare states that support a class compromise. The Varieties of (Welfare) Capitalism literature is increasingly used as a complementary theory of production systems although its rationale for social policies is largely incompatible with the Worlds typology. This article argues, first, that popular regime typologies have degenerated as a research programme, notwithstanding their many achievements. The main reason for this lies in a simplistic notion of the relationship between politics and economics in modern society. Secondly, the article outlines an alternative for analysing welfare provisions and their evolution, drawing on insights of the new politics and the new economics of welfare. This framework can give a systematic account of welfare program restructuring that undermines regime typologies. It suggests a different question for the political economy of welfare, namely how capitalism and democracy can be kept distinct.

This paper characterizes welfare in a small open economy and derives the corresponding optimal monetary policy rule. It shows that the utility-based loss function for a small open economy is a quadratic expression in domestic inflation, output gap and real exchange rate. In contrast to previous works, this paper demonstrates that welfare in a small open economy, completely integrated with the rest of the world, is affected by exchange rate variability. Consequently, the optimal policy in a small open economy is not isomorphic to a closed economy and does not prescribe a pure floating exchange rate regime. Domestic inflation targeting is optimal only under a particular parameterization, where the unique relevant distortion in the economy is price stickiness. Under a general specification for preferences and in the presence of inefficient steady state output, exchange rate targeting arises as part of the optimal monetary plan.

One of the acknowledged limitations of British welfare-to-work policies has been that they do not necessarily succeed in assisting people with multiple problems and needs. This article will first examine conflicting aspects of welfare-to-work policies and the conflict between welfare-to-work and the concept of work–life balance, particularly as this may apply to people whose lives are especially difficult. Secondly, the article reports on the general findings of a small scale qualitative study of the labour market experiences of people with multiple problems and needs and, more particularly, an analysis of the discursive strategies used by participants in the study. The article concludes with some observations about how welfare-to-work might be re-conceptualised to accommodate ontological as well as practical life needs.

Most accounts of welfare aggregation in the tradition of Arrow's (1951/1963) and Sen's (1970/1979) social-choice-theoretic frameworks represent the welfare of an individual in terms of a single welfare ordering or a single scalar-valued welfare function. I develop a multidimensional generalization of Arrow's and Sen's frameworks, representing individual welfare in terms of multiple personal welfare functions, corresponding to multiple 'dimensions' of welfare. I show that, as in the one-dimensional case, the existence of attractive aggregation procedures depends on certain informational assumptions, specifically about the measurability of welfare and its comparability not only across individuals but also across dimensions. I state several impossibility and possibility results. Under Arrow-type conditions, insufficient comparability across individuals leads to dictatorship of a single individual, while insufficient comparability across dimensions leads to dominance of a single dimension. Given sufficient comparability both across individuals and across dimensions, a range of possibilities emerges. I discuss the substantive implications of the results.

Welfare to work policy is central to British reforms of its welfare state and social security system. We are not alone in our desire to assist unemployed and other claimants to find and retain work. It is therefore important to be able to look to other countries and consider lessons that could be drawn. Learning from abroad is a difficult and challenging exercise. While it is tempting to try and take the ‘best’ aspects of foreign policies and to bring them home, it is often dangerous to do so without a real appreciation of their context – not only their macro-economic and ideological foundations – but also their organisational basis. The core task of welfare to work programmes is to enable and encourage non-employed claimants of cash transfer programmes to work or to better prepare them for employment. The core of this report is a comparison of British, American, French, German and Dutch practices.

It is increasingly recognised that improving the quality and quantity of children’s services is an essential part of any long-term strategy to tackle poverty and social exclusion among children. As part of its wider programme to address child poverty in England, Save The Children commissioned this review of expenditure to examine how much is spent on children, particularly poor children, on major public services – education, health, social care, and housing – as well as social security. The results give an indication of the priority this government attaches to meeting the needs of children, in particular poor children, which can be set alongside evidence on outcomes for children, including trends in child poverty, children’s health and educational outcomes.

Based on case studies of NGOs in three cities, this paper discusses some of the common constraints on the ability of Chinese social welfare NGOs to perform both service delivery and advocacy functions at the present time. It shows that the effectiveness of NGOs is above all conditioned by their institutional environment. When the general level of social welfare provision in a country is low, it also sets a limit to what NGOs can achieve. Given the crucial importance of the institutional context to NGO performance, the paper concludes by arguing that unless the context is changed, NGO performance is unlikely to be drastically improved by capacity building programmes that only focus on these organisations themselves.

Vic George examines the views of welfare theorists from ancient times to the 19th century, considering a range of welfare issues including wealth, poverty and inequality, slavery, and gender issues through the eyes of Aristotle, Locke, and Mary Wollstonecraft amongst others. Covering a wealth of theory, the disappointment of Major Thinkers in Welfare lies in its lack of a concluding chapter, writes Jacob Lesniewski, but there remains great value in George’s approach.

Recent government pronouncements in the UK and above all the recent Conservative Party (2008) policy document on welfare reform suggest that US welfare reform is increasingly being taken as a model for the UK. What lessons should the UK draw from US experience? The long established means tested programme for needy families known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was replaced in 1996 with a welfare to work programme known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The historical background and features of the new program are elaborated and the way it has been implemented in varied ways in different states is documented. The findings of a number of outcome studies assessing the programme’s impact and effectiveness are reviewed. Three commentaries on the paper consider how far American experience should be a guide to welfare policy in Britain. With commentaries by Kitty Stewart, David Piachaud and Howard Glennerster

This paper examines the effects of recent welfare reforms in the US and UK on the well-being of children in low-income families, looking specifically at the effects on poverty, family expenditures, and child health and development. The paper finds some commonalities but also some notable differences. Common to both countries is a sizable reduction in child poverty, although the reduction in child poverty in the US has been less, and some families appear to have been left behind. Expenditure data also point to divergence across the two countries. In the UK, low-income families affected by the reforms are spending more money on items related to children and are more likely to own a car and a phone, while in the US, families affected by welfare reforms are primarily spending more money on items related to employment but not items for children. Finally, a common finding across countries is a relative dearth of more direct evidence on the well-being of children, and specifically how the reforms have affected child health and development. Identifying such effects remains an important topic for further research.

This paper examines the distribution of the ¿social wage¿ benefits in kind from welfare services, including the National Health Service, state education, social housing, and personal social services. The current Government has put a strong emphasis on improving public services and has begun to translate this into higher spending. Although most measures of poverty ignore the social wage, its inclusion is potentially very significant in monitoring the impact of government policies on the poorest households. The paper produces estimates of the value of the social wage for 1996/7 and 2000/01, using data from several large-scale household surveys, and makes comparisons with estimates from previous work going back to 1979. The results show that people in poorer households receive a greater share of benefits in kind from welfare services than those in richer households and that this ¿pro-poor¿ bias has been rising gradually over the long-term. Since 1996/7, spending on welfare services has grown faster than in the past and there has been a further incremental shift in favour of lower income groups across all the major services. These changes have reinforced the re-distributional effects of tax and benefit policies over the same period...

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 represents a dramatic change in the US welfare state. One of its key goals was to move lone mothers, even those with young children, from welfare to work. Early evidence suggests that, in concert with a strong economy, progress has been made - welfare caseloads have fallen dramatically and the employment rates of lone mothers have increased substantially. In addition to the federal reforms, state level welfare reforms played an important role prior to 1996 and are playing an even more important role subsequent to 1996 as PRWORA gives states unprecedented flexibility in designing and implementing their welfare systems. In this paper, we examine some key state-level reforms, using evidence from selected states, to illustrate the three major types of policies used in the US to move lone mothers from welfare to work: mandating work (Michigan); making work pay (Michigan and Minnesota); and helping families with child care (Illinois). We conclude that each of these policies has a role to play in moving lone mothers from welfare to work, but that further policies are needed if the US is to also to do a better job of reducing child poverty.

Economic evaluation has an important role in helping to make decisions about the use of scarce resources in an explicit and rational manner, yet economic evaluation is not well-developed in many areas of social welfare. This paper looks at the reasons for this, focusing on what economists could do to redress the situation. It argues that standard approaches to economic evaluation may not always be appropriate, because of the nature of many social welfare interventions and because evaluators need to be able to address a broader set of evaluation questions. Economists could usefully contribute more to the debates that have concerned mainstream evaluators from other disciplines and modify their approach to evaluation accordingly. The paper concludes that in many areas of social welfare, economists should probably be less ambitious in terms of what they set out to achieve in terms of economic evaluation, but more ambitious in terms of the types of programme they can usefully help to evaluate and in terms of the range of techniques they are prepared to use, and give credence to, as part of an economic evaluation.

The paper presents an abstract definition of linear inequality concepts leading to linearly invariant inequality measures and characterizes the class of linear concepts completely. Two general methods of deriving ethical measures are proposed. They imply an Atkinson-Kolm-Sen index and a new dual index reflecting the inequality of living standard. Then all separable social welfare orderings which generate linearly invariant measures are characterized. The measures are presented and their general properties discussed. Dual measures prove to be additively decomposable. Linear welfare orderings defined on rank-ordered income vectors are examined. They are consistent with all linear inequality and yield an inequality ordering for every concept.

This report features the proceedings from a workshop held at the University of Kurdistan-Hewlêr in Erbil on 27 May 2014 as part of the Academic Collaboration research project between LSE MEC and AUD. The workshop focused on the relationship between international actors in institutional reconstruction and gender relations in Kurdistan-Iraq since 2003.

This CASEbrief summarises findings from CASEpaper 10, 'East Asian social welfare: a comparative analysis including private welfare', by Didier Jacobs.

This CASEbrief summarises findings from 'The state of welfare: the economics of social spending', edited by H. Glennerster and J. Hills and published by Oxford University Press

This thesis presents the results of a qualitative investigation of Unemployment Benefit II (UBII) recipients' experiences of skill training and job placement services under Germany's Hartz IV welfare reforms—arguably a (neo-) liberal intervention in the context of what has traditionally been described as a conservative-corporatist welfare regime. This thesis explores the experience of skills training and job placement services in terms of the degree to which these support mechanisms engage with UBII recipients’ needs and perceptions and how these necessarily reflect the purposes of the support and activation mechanisms (to provide support to and assist the long-term unemployed find work) and the underlying policy assumptions (that the long-term unemployed need to be made to demonstrate responsibility in finding work). The evidence presented suggests such services have not necessarily provided a route into regular employment. Instead the ‘support’ mechanisms tend to ‘busy’ the recipients; to be irrelevant to the recipients’ employment history and/or future interests; and not to match what recipients wish to, or are interested in, doing. Secondly, the policy rhetoric and design of the Hartz IV reforms implied, ostensibly...

Why does the public so staunchly support harsh criminal justice policies when the social, fiscal and political costs are so great? Individuals in countries such as Canada, the UK and USA continue to want criminal offenders to receive stiffer sentences despite growing prison populations and some indication of lower crime rates (Cullen, Fisher & Applegate, 2000; Donohue, 2007; King, 2008; Raphael, 2009; Tseloni et al., 2010; Useem et al., 2003; Walmsley, 2009). Criminological research has identified cognitive and affective pathways that predict punitiveness toward crime, such as the judged wrongfulness and harmfulness of crime, and moral outrage (Carlsmith & Darley, 2008). The overall contribution of the five papers presented in this thesis is to identify the cognitive, affective and behavioural pathways that link social perception of criminals to punitiveness toward crime. Working at the intersection of social psychology and criminology, the thesis applies theoretical frameworks such as the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002) and Behaviour from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes map (Cuddy, Fiske & Glick, 2007) to identify the functional relation between social perception and punitiveness. Using different methodologies and at different levels of analysis...

This thesis analyses the welfare arrangements of the Portuguese elderly from an historical and a sociological perspective. Two goals form the focus of the thesis. First, it attempts to enrich the discussion on familialism as a model of welfare provision in old age in Portugal. Starting with the historical analysis of the process of consolidation of a model of welfare provision that is based on a set of assumptions about the existence of intergenerational ties and kin solidarity throughout the life course, the thesis moves on to the sociological analysis of family dynamics and normative propositions related to welfare arrangements in old age. The broad question underlying the analysis is to know how resilient and operative is familialism as a logics of welfare provision for the Portuguese elderly. The thesis shows that the resilience of familialism in the lives of the elderly is related to a complex set of social, economic and normative intricacies that still provide for a support network in old age but that show signs of being under accelerated erosion. Second, the thesis aims to make a contribution to the analysis of welfare states and social policies in familialist countries by demonstrating the explanatory power of family arrangements for understanding welfare arrangements in old age. This involves introducing in the analysis of welfare arrangements a focus on intergenerational and kin relationships...