Work Orientations of the Poor and Income Maintenance

Attitudes towards work are compared between a non-poverty sample and a group of poor involved in an experimental income maintenance scheme. Two problems are examined. The first tests work orientation differences between the poor and the non-poor. The second assesses the supposed ‘work disincentive effect’ of income maintenance. Contrary to the ‘culture of poverty’ thesis and the logic underlying many policy efforts, it was found that the poor are strongly motivated to achieve through work. Male/female comparisons revealed that non-work tendencies are evident among the female poor. These, however, are attributed to their acceptance of different role expectations. It was also shown that over time the work orientations of the poor remained stable under conditions of guaranteed income support. The hypothesized ‘work disincentive effect’ of income maintenance was not supported.     

Compulsory Income Management in the Northern Territory – evaluating its impact

Australia has been experimenting with constraining the ways in which welfare recipients can spend their income support payments, limiting their ability to access cash and purchase some products. The policy objectives include to reduce spending on alcohol, gambling, pornography and tobacco in favour of meeting ‘basic’ family needs, especially for children, to limit the scope for financial harassment, encourage pro‐social behaviours, and build financial capabilities. In the logic of the programs these outcomes are expected to be manifest at the individual, family and community levels. The policy has primarily impacted on Indigenous Australians as a result of its geographic targeting, although a recent report has recommended a more stringent version of the program be introduced universally to all welfare recipients other than the aged. The largest of these experiments is ‘New Income Management’ in the Northern Territory, which has had more than 35,000 participants since its introduction in 2010. This article reports on the key findings of the major independent evaluation of New Income Management commissioned by the Australian Government.     

Low income and ‘poverty lines’ in Norway: a comparison of three concepts

Borgeraas E, Dahl E. Low income and ‘poverty lines’ in Norway: a comparison of three concepts
Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 73–83 © 2008 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. In this article we address the question of how well three concepts of ‘poverty’ correspond with each other. We have compared three different measures of ‘poverty’ in Norway: income poverty and two measures of a minimum budget standard, one scientifically and one politically defined. The three measures rest on different underlying concepts, serve different purposes and yield significantly different poverty lines. If followed by the municipal social services, the governmental norms for social benefits will, paradoxically, leave the beneficiaries in income poverty as defined by that same government. The most generous poverty line of all three measures is provided by the minimum budget standard developed by the National Institute for Consumer Research in Norway, which rests on the assumption that a household's income has to give a sustainable financial situation in the longer run. Neither of the two other poverty measures have this property. All numbers pertain to the year 2005. Some political and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Charity or Entitlement? Generational Habitus and the Welfare State among Older People in North‐east England

Current UK policies aimed at reducing pensioner poverty involve targeting those in greatest need by supplementing their incomes with means-tested welfare benefits. It is believed that such policies provide more resources for those in greatest need. However, non-uptake of state welfare benefits by many older UK citizens exacerbates the widening income gap between the richest and poorest pensioners. We examine the underlying beliefs and discourses among those currently in retirement who lived through a time when welfare programmes had more of a putative abstract universalism than is now the case. Based on the narratives of people aged over 60 in North-east England, we show how the collective forces of structure and individual practice in relation to welfare accumulate over a lifetime and influence the ways in which people interact with the welfare system in later life. We find that the reasons for the apparent lack of agency among older people in relation to claiming benefit entitlements are linked to the particular social, economic and political circumstances which have prevailed at various points prior to and since the inception of the UK welfare state. We argue that the failure of some older citizens to operate as citizen consumers can be conceptualized in terms of a generational welfare 'habitus', the consequences of which are likely to exacerbate inequalities in later life.     

Welfare Attitudes of Singaporeans – Ambiguity in Shifting Socio‐political Dynamics

This article presents findings from a survey of 440 Singaporeans on their attitudes towards welfare and welfare recipients. Attitudes were generally favourable, but sentiments towards higher taxes to help the poor were ambivalent. Controlled for demographic characteristics, ‘poverty sympathizers’ and affiliates of opposition political parties held the most liberal views, but were not more willing to pay higher taxes. Instead, poor respondents on the one hand and highly educated respondents on the other hand were more willing to pay higher taxes. Knowledge accumulation and beliefs about causes of poverty were strong predictors of attitudes. Effects of personal values and self‐interest were less evident. Couched against the backdrop of an economy that has experienced rapid transformation and one of the widest income inequality in the developed world, the article discusses the critical juncture of social response and policy choices that Singapore finds itself.     

GNP: The Modern Golden Calf

Gross National Product (GNP) is generally considered to be a measure of living standards. It is maintained in this paper that such a profound misunderstanding of a technical economic concept, which in fact measures productivity and not welfare, is leading to an uncritical pursuit of rising industrial output. It is now recognized that the ‘second-order consequences’ of industrial output may lead to global environmental pollution, of which thermal pollution may be the most ominous. It is concluded, that, for the sake of posterity, we need a rapid transition from a ‘cowboy economy’ to a ‘spaceman economy’.     

Subjective Well‐being Poverty of the Elderly Population in China

Poverty is represented not only by objective well‐being indicators which include income and consumption levels, but also by subjective indicators which reflect what a person feels. It is estimated in this article that the incidence of subjective well‐being poverty (SWP) among the Chinese rural elderly population in 2006 was 9.7 per cent, about 4.2 times as much as that of the country's total rural population in the same year, which was 2.3 per cent. Over 16 per cent of the rural elderly population and 11.5 per cent of the urban elderly population rated their life satisfaction as poor or very poor. In terms of SWP, senior citizens, especially those who live in rural areas or who are women or very aged, have become a special group among the poor in China. This article suggests that China's social policies for the new stage take into account the issue of absolute poverty and also that of SWP. A multi‐dimensional strategy system targeting the issue of poverty needs to be established, and a policy system to address poverty reduction as well as old age security and care should be implemented.     

Beyond Symptoms: Crime Prevention And Community Development

Crime and crime prevention are currently ‘hot’ political and social issues. Fuelled by public calls for ‘solutions’, the responses by politicians and planners are typically ‘quick‐fix’ with emphasis on management of particular problems as, and where, they arise. We argue for longer term strategies aimed at dealing with the political, social, economic and cultural factors associated with crime. In doing so, we explore the potential of community development to contribute to crime prevention, particularly ‘community’ or ‘street’ crime and violence. Theoretical and practice intersections between community development and certain crime prevention approaches are identified – notably those which link crime and violence with dis‐empowerment, poverty, inequality, exclusion, the learning of violence within families and communities, and lack of opportunity for children and young people to develop their potential. We conclude that there is plenty of evidence to support the view that community development processes should be used more frequently in crime prevention programmes.     

‘Let the King Save the Poor’: The Discursive Mechanism Underlying the Under‐exercise of Social Rights in South Korea

This study was prompted by discrepancies observed between the quantitative expansion and the qualitative stalemate in social policy in South Korea. Despite a revamped social security system, changes in South Korean social policies have not led to significant coverage expansion or improved income and poverty distribution. The frequent appearance of the Korean proverb that ‘even the King cannot save the poor’ in policy participants' narratives reflects a lack of confidence in the Government's ability to address persistent social disadvantages and the prevalence of a fatalistic policy perspective. This proverb has a conceptual affinity with an individualistic approach and has effectively functioned as a governance tool to oppress the progress of welfare rights. This research shows that an expenditure‐based model could lead to actual policy situations being misrepresented. Further, institutional policy arrangements may not be a sufficient condition for improving policy performance. It is suggested that a rights‐based approach should be adopted for both theorization of the transition of the welfare regimes and discursive practice for a policy paradigm change.     

Direct payments to Japanese farmers: Do they reduce rice income inequality? Lessons for other Asian countries

This study investigates the income-equalizing effect of direct payments on rice income inequality in Japan using the Gini decomposition and the concentration curve. The results indicate that the direct payments in Japan are highly concentrated but they nevertheless reduce rice income inequality. However, the equalizing effect of direct payments is less than that in other countries because the Japanese payments are linked to participation in an acreage reduction program and are not fully decoupled. To pursue greater income equality, policymakers should decouple the payments and introduce mechanisms to decrease or limit the amount of support to the largest beneficiaries.     

Conceptualising the politics of social protection expansion in low income countries: The intersection of transnational ideas and domestic politics

The growing literature on social protection in low income developing countries has tended to focus on definitional debates, policy design and impact evaluations, with relatively little consideration of the ways in which politics shape policy. This article argues that politics needs to be at the centre of efforts to understand social protection and outlines a new conceptual framework for investigating this, with a particular focus on explaining the variation in progress made by low income countries in adopting and implementing social protection. We propose that an adapted ‘political settlements’ framework that incorporates insights from the literatures on welfare state development – notably ‘power constellations’ theory, discursive institutionalism and global policy networks – can help frame political commitment to social protection as flowing from the interaction of domestic political economy and transnational ideas. Importantly, this approach situates social protection within a broader political and policy context, and highlights the influence of underlying power relations at multiple levels.     

When farmers are planting houses …

This paper examines the reasons behind the continual growth of the phenomenon of famers ‘planting’ cheap and substandard houses on farmland in rural China repeatedly and without government permission. The practice has been commonly interpreted by local governments as schemes instigated by greedy farmers to maximise compensation payments from the government when their properties are requisitioned for public infrastructural or private development projects. Researchers however have found that such practices are measures farmers learnt from others to insure themselves against land grabs as well as inadequate compensation offered by local governments and developers. Their vulnerability however also spanned a growing illegal industry where farmers short of cash were lured into participating in organised ‘house planting’ projects although they could be caught and put in jail by local authorities. Other researchers are equally concerned by the threat of food security should these incidences continue to escalate. However, these problems would not be easily addressed because the survival of local governments has grown to be heavily dependent on both the huge revenues generated by and winning political mileage from urbanising the rural, or converting agricultural to non-agricultural lands.     

Social Policy's ‘Greatest Hits’

The ‘age of metrics’ or ‘the metric tide’ in the form of bibliometrics has largely by‐passed Social Policy. This study aims to broaden the focus from the most cited articles in Social Policy journals to discover the most cited works in Social Policy or ‘Social Policy's Greatest Hits’. It finds some 24 works with over 2000 Google Scholar citations, but only nine of these are by social policy writers. In terms of total citations, Gosta Esping‐Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is the clear leader by a significant margin, with the most cited Social Policy (or Social Administration) writers being Peter Townsend, Richard Titmuss, Ruth Lister and Jane Lewis. In addition to total citations, it presents citations per year, and ‘Social Policy citations’ (i.e. the use made of the work within the discipline of Social Policy). This list is headed by Gosta Esping‐Andersen and Paul Pierson, with the leading social policy writer being Jane Lewis. This article presents a set of the ‘most plausible contenders’ for the works with greatest influence within Social Policy or ‘Social Policy's Greatest Hits’. It is concluded that, even with its flaws, bibliometrics is an important approach to exploring the vast field of Social Policy.     

Social capital and community building through an electronic network

This paper describes a social policy experiment that explores current and potential links between trends in Australian public policy. The central example is provided by the implementation of a wired community set up in a low‐income public housing estate by an entrepreneurial not‐for‐profit internet service provider, InfoXchange. ‘Reach for the Clouds’, the wired community being established at Atherton Gardens in Fitzroy, Melbourne, is attractive to policy‐makers and funding bodies, combining community‐building, public‐private partnerships, self‐help and place‐based management. However, although the project is promoted as an exercise in community‐building through technology, many of the key assumptions are untested. It seems self‐evident that low‐income people who are socially and economically excluded would benefit from greater ‘connectedness’ with one another. However, it is not clear that such exchanges, online or off‐line, will build ‘community’. The paper attempts to establish some distinctions between online communities of interest and place based communities, untangling the relationship between social connectedness and models of social capital.     

The Politics of Social Research: A Social Research Strategy for the Community Health,Education and Welfare Movement

The experience of the author led to a consideration of the political nature of social policy oriented research, with a view to developing a strategy which might overcome some of the dissatisfactions experienced with traditional research approaches. Traditional approaches, largely because of their technical nature, have meant a neglect or diminution of those precise characteristics which have characterized the ‘community’ orientation among health and welfare workers. There is a clear need for a research strategy which reflects these characteristics. Such a strategy is proposed. A brief historical perspective is also included to give a context in which such research styles have operated over the past ten years in Australia.     

The Political Consequences of Outsider Labour Market Status in the United States: A Micro‐level Study

This article contributes to recent research that seeks to understand the political consequences of ‘outsider’ labour market status. There is an emerging consensus that labour market outsiders have systematically different policy preferences and display systematically different political behaviour to securely employed ‘insiders’ in Europe. Yet the political consequences of outsider status in the USA are less clear. They may be expected to differ from those that have been documented in the European context, because: (1) the USA is characterized by low employment protection of insiders; and (2) there is evidence that Americans are more reluctant than Europeans to hold governments responsible for personal economic hardship. We therefore use the General Social Survey to examine how outsider labour market status is related to voting behaviour and to social policy preferences in the USA. We find that the concept of ‘labour market outsider’ – as conventionally operationalized – holds little explanatory power in the American context. Disaggregating the outsider category, our results suggest that the political consequences of outsider labour market status may be contingent on individual beliefs about government responsibility.     

Toleration or trust? Investigating the acceptance of ‘boat people’ among young Australians

There has been intense debate in Australia regarding how asylum seekers who arrive by boat should be treated. Some call for compassion towards those prepared to risk their lives to seek protection, whereas others believe ‘boat people’ should not be allowed into the country. This article uses data from a large representative sample of young people in Queensland, Australia, to understand the acceptance of asylum seekers by young people in Australia. The findings suggest that young Australians are more accepting than the Australian adult population. Several social and political background factors were also found to be associated with the belief that ‘boat people’ should be permitted into Australia. Fewer factors, however, are associated with the trust young Australians have in people from another country. This suggests that while some young Australians may believe boats carrying asylum seekers should not be turned away, fewer might be prepared to enter into trusting relationships with ‘boat people’ should they resettle in Australia.     

Structural Adjustment in Lesotho: An Evaluation

This paper evaluates the 1988–90 structural adjustment program in Lesotho using a computable general equilibrium model. It finds that the program failed to rectify a balance of payments problem, and that without a massive inflow of capital for a water project the country would be facing a major balance of payments crisis. Lesotho’s experience suggests that structural adjustment need not work against the poor, and that the balance of payments objective may be achieved by reducing recurrent government expenditures, other than wages.     

Motoring Offences as Crime: Some Priorities for Social and Action Research

This paper highlights recent trends in criminology and assesses their relevance for road safety research. It is concluded that research priorities should be in the areas of general deterrence (particularly the value of random breath testing), physical prevention and study of the criminal justice system (especially the police). In addition, close attention should be paid to the political context within which the research is carried out. Lessons for methodology include greater use of direct and self reported measures of behaviour in addition to official statistics, experimental techniques rather than ‘quasi-experimental’, where possible, and interrupted time series analyses of the effects of legislative changes. There is a great need for a close analysis of the way in which traffic crash and violation data are recorded.     

An Exploration into States' Commitment to AFDC

There are great differences in the level of income that state governments provide to poor families with children. This study attempts to identify, through a stepwise regression analysis, statistically significant determinants of maximum monthly AFDC payments in the state. Controlling for other variables in the multiple regression model, the percentage of nonwhite population in the state is found to be the strongest predictor of the level of maximum monthly AFDC payments (a negative relationship). Per capita personal income and tax effort in the state are also found to be statistically significant predictors of the dependent variable (positive relationships).