全面推进社会福利社会化

随着社会主义市场经济体制的逐步建立和民政工作改革的日益深化，社会福利社会化问题已经成为民政系统内外关注的一个问题。社会福利社会化的深度很大程度上代表了民政事业社会化的程度。笔者认为，各级民政部门应当加大社会福利社会化的宣传和实践力度，全面推进社会福利社会化＿推进社会福利社会化，关键是各级民政部门必须切实解放思想，转变观念，真正树立适应社会主义市场经济的新观念。新思想；核心是按照社会主义市场经济的要求，运用市场经济的运作力式、建立社会福利产业，构建社会福利制度，把社会福利事业真正推向市场。推向社会…     

深化改革 推动社会福利社会化

近年来,我国社会福利事业取得了长足的发展,初步建立起了不同类型、不同层次、不同内容的社会福利服务体系,逐步改变过去单纯依靠政府财政投资、完全由国家包办包管的状态,出现了政府主导、部门配合、社会参与的发展局面。但是,社会福利社会化的探索和实践还仅仅是初步的、局部的,尚未从根本上改革政府包揽的体制。因此,要明确思路,转变观念,深化改革,加快推进社会福利社会化。     

当前我国社会福利机构的改革与发展——社会福利问题的行政管理学研究

所谓社会福利机构,是指国家、社会组织和个人举办的,为老年人、残疾人、孤儿和弃婴提供养护、康复、托管等服务的机构。 改革开放以来,我国社会福利事业稳步发展,成就斐然。截至2002年底,全国城乡各种福利机构已达4.0万个;床位125.1万张,比上年增长0.4％;收养92.6万人,比上年增长3.4％。这些数据充分表明,我国社会福利机构的壮大为社会福利社会化格局的形成奠定了坚实的基础。     

社会福利社会化带来儿童福利机构新的发展趋势

2000年2月13日,民政部等部门在《关于加快实现社会福利社会化的意见》中指出"儿童福利机构在今后一段时间仍以政府管理为主,也可吸纳社会资金合办,同时通过收养、寄养、助养和接收社会捐赠等多种形式走社会化发展的路子"。天津市儿童福利院抓住时机,积极开展社会福利社会化,机构的服务随着社会福利社会化呈现出全新的发展态势,促进了机构的职能转变。     

社会福利社会化政策的反思—以养老服务为例

以养老服务为例,分析了我国社会福利社会化的发展历程,以及实践中存在的几个突出理论问题,即如何理解老年服务的适度普惠、养老机构的福利性和市场化的关系以及政府、社会、市场在养老服务中的作用,以期为我国社会福利社会化的健康发展提供理论参考。     

加强社会福利机构的档案管理

随着我国社会福利事业的快速发展,特别是社会福利社会化的不断推进,社会福利机构特别是民办社会福利机构将越来越多。在加强社会福利机构的管理中,作为基础性工作的社会福利机构档案管理应当提到议事日程,引起广泛重视。不管是国有、集体所有还是民办的社会福利机构,其档案均具有十分重要的保存价值和使用开发价值。     

改革创新谋发展 团结奉献筑和谐——社会福利工作回顾与展望

2005年社会福利工作回顾2005年,中国的社会福利事业在发展中完善、在改革中创新。“孤残儿童手术康复明天计划”取得阶段性成果,孤儿政策研究制定工作正式启动,养老服务社会化示范活动初见成效,社会福利社会化进程不断推进,社会福利服务层次和水平不断提高,社会福利事业向着社会化方向稳步前进。同时,2005年社会福利和社会事务     

吉安市社会福利工作成绩斐然

近年来,根据社会福利社会化的要求,江西省吉安市通过政府投入,社会参与,多轮驱动,广泛整合社会资源,推动社会福利工作,取得显著成效。一是社会福利机构发展亮点纷呈。该市共有社会福利机构261所,床位数9681张。每千名老人拥有床位数18张,高于全省平均水平,更高于全国提出的到2005年每千名老人拥有床位数达10张的目标。隶属于该市的遂川县平     

力寻突破口推进社会福利社会化

作为民政事业深化改革的一项重大举措 社会福利社会化是对我国计划经济体制下国家包办民政直管社会福利体制的一次突破广东省立足社会需要发挥其市场经济发达社会资金充足海外华侨众多的优势力寻突破口用政策鼓励靠市场引导调动社会力量兴办福利事业从而走上了多元化高水平的发展之路     

为社会福利和社会事务鼓与呼

早春二月,处处充满着盎然生机,金鸡鸣唱,畅想着希望。《社会福利》杂志在2005年以崭新的面貌呈现在读者面前,思路清新了,栏目更新了,内容创新了。它以更敏锐的目光来聚焦社会福利和社会事务,以更宽阔的视野来宣传社会福利和社会事务。是的,社会福利和社会事务工作需要宣传,需要舆论鼓与呼。无论是"明天计划"的实施,还是养老服务社会化示范活动的开展;无论是福利事业民办公助、公办民营的探索,还是社会福利社会化的推进;无论     

Welfare Rigidity,the Composition of Public Expenditure and the Welfare Trap

Welfare expenditure is characterized by rigidity, i.e., it goes up easily but is very hard to get down. We introduced welfare rigidity into an endogenous growth model that includes government expenditure to analyze the impact of welfare rigidity and the composition of public expenditure on economic growth and family utility. Our findings show that welfare spending and economic growth have a non-monotonic relationship that is negative or inverted U-shaped depending on cross-country differences. Higher welfare rigidity reduces long-term economic growth and household utility. According to the estimated optimal size of welfare expenditure, China, as a developing country with a large population, has to do all it can to improve people’s livelihood but must at the same time weigh its limited resources so that its welfare expenditure does not fall into a “welfare trap.”     

Welfare Policies and the Construction of Welfare Relations in a Residual Welfare State: The Case of Hong Kong

Each welfare system has its own welfare relations for shaping and maintaining certain types of welfare practices and welfare ideologies. Welfare relations concern the distribution of welfare responsibilities among various social institutions, the public's welfare expectations and entitlements, and the status of welfare recipients. Welfare policies, which are a legal basis of the dominant class's philosophy as well as a mechanism for policing welfare recipients' use of benefits, play an important role in shaping and constructing the welfare relations of a country. This paper discusses how welfare policies construct the required welfare relations with regard to Hong Kong's social security system. It is argued that the persistence of Hong Kong's residual welfare model is partly based on the residual welfare relations which facilitate family-centred and market-oriented welfare practices.     

Social Citizenship Rights and the Welfare Circle Dilemma: Attitudinal Findings of Two Chinese Societies

This paper places social citizenship momentum into the context of squaring the welfare circle for examination. Citizenship is a powerful world-level organizing principle especially by the minority groups for their claim of equal treatment. The squaring of welfare circle refers to the need of the governments to constrain their budgets but also meet the rising demands from and needs of their people. This comparative study looks at the attitudinal findings of two Chinese societies of Hong Kong and Taiwan to see whether or not the cultural factor can mitigate the momentum of social citizenship rights and the demand side of the welfare circle. Implications for social policy are also discussed.     

Turnover in the Child Welfare Workforce: A Different Perspective

ABSTRACT

Child welfare agencies across the country are experiencing a workforce crisis involving high staff turnover rates. The purpose of this study was to determine which of the organizational, personal, and supervisory variables identified in prior research on this topic are most associated with intent to leave among employees in urban and rural child welfare settings. Four-hundred-and-forty-seven employees in 13 child welfare agencies participated in a survey addressing organizational, personal, and supervisory factors related to turnover. ANOVA, logistical regression, and structural equation modeling were used in the data analysis. The organizational and supervisory variables identified as significant in the logistic regression, as in earlier research, were not significant when the data were subjected to structural equation modeling. Instead, findings suggest that career satisfaction and satisfaction with paperwork are the key determinants of workers' intention to stay.     

Welfare consequences of the Swedish disability service system

It has been frequently discussed whether the Swedish disability service system is efficient and whether it meets the demands of equity. The costs of the system for support and service were recently estimated to be USD 11 billion. This article describes the welfare situation for disabled people compared with the general population in Sweden. The Swedish disability service system has managed to provide disabled people with a disposable income over the subsistence minimum in Sweden, but also in the same range as for the general population. In other welfare parameters, disabled people appear to have great welfare losses compared with the general population. Evaluations of handicap technologies (such as service and support) aiming to reduce or compensate for these welfare losses have to meet the requirements of equity and efficiency of the Swedish disability service system.     

East Asian Welfare Regimes: Testing the Hypothesis of the Developmental Welfare State

Following the three welfare regimes constructed by Esping‐Andersen, many scholars have addressed the question of whether there may be a further type of regime, differing from the categories of liberal, conservative and social democratic, pertaining to other parts of the world. Discussion has centred largely on East Asia and, in particular, on the notion of the developmental/productivist welfare regime. Yet these discussions have been based more on conceptual classification than empirical analysis. This article attempts to fill in the gap, with reference to the developmental characteristics of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. A set of 15 indicators is developed for the factor and cluster analysis of 20 countries, based on data from the 1980s and 1990s. The results indicate the existence of a new group, consisting of Taiwan and South Korea, which is distinct from Esping‐Andersen's three regimes – unlike Japan, which remains a composite of various regime types. Regime characteristics peculiar to the cases of Taiwan and South Korea include: low/medium social security expenditure, high social investment, more extensive gender discrimination in salary, medium/high welfare stratification, a high non‐coverage rate for pensions, high individual welfare loading, and high family welfare responsibility. When compared with Esping‐Andersen's three regimes, the East Asian developmental regime shows similarity with his conservative model, in respect of welfare stratification, while the non‐coverage of welfare entitlements is similar to his liberal model. There is virtually no evidence of any similarity between the developmental welfare regime and Esping‐Andersen's social democratic regime type.     

The Changing Shape of Welfare Policy in Korea: Analysis of Break Point in the Welfare Budget

This paper aims to investigate the welfare policy change in South Korea. Based on punctuated equilibrium theory, I analyze kurtosis and break point of the distribution of variation in the general government welfare budget. As a result, the change in welfare budget levels in South Korea has been quite moderate. But two break points were set in 1977 and 1999. These cutoff points are related with the change of the Korean Welfare State and clearly distinguished from different times. That is, the characteristics of structure that were built during these two time periods have lasted until now. Specifically, the responsibility of state in welfare is narrow. And the feature of employment‐friendly welfare policy was formed in 1977. Also, the focus on livelihood security and employment in welfare spending was constructed in 1999. The analysis of budget is a useful tool in examining the policy change. We expect to find more specific characteristics of the Korean welfare state including special accounts and funds in future.     

The Effects of Depressive Symptoms on Work Activities and Welfare Exit of Welfare Recipients in Korea1

The purpose of this research is to examine the link between depressive symptoms of welfare recipients and their work activity and welfare exit using a secondary dataset, entitled the Korean Welfare Panel Study. In 2000, the National Basic Livelihood Security System (NBLSS) was introduced to (i) ensure a basic standard of living for households in poverty, and (ii) promote work activity and welfare exit of the recipients. A considerable body of literature has reported that the policy outcome of the NBLSS is not a success. However, the reason for the low success rate is unclear. In contrast to studies in the USA, few studies in Korea investigated the effect of depression on welfare‐to‐work transitions. To bridge the gap in the literature, we examine the association between depression, work activity, and welfare exit using a logistic regression analytic method. The analytic results show that the level of depression (total score on the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale) was negatively associated with welfare recipients’ work activity and welfare exit, suggesting that depressive symptoms may be a significant barrier to promoting economic self‐sufficiency. Implications of the study findings are further discussed.     

Parents' perceptions of contact with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services

Listening to the opinions of service users is important in research. This study explored how parents cognitively and emotionally perceive contact with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services (CWS). It also compared the reports of parents recently referred to the CWS with reports of more experienced users. A content analysis was conducted on open‐ended survey responses from parents (n = 697). This study fills a gap in the literature on how parents perceive contact with the CWS and what they see as important factors when judging this contact. The findings showed that 40.6% of the parents reported exclusively positive experiences, 30.7% of the parents reported solely negative experiences, while 24% of the parents described both positive and negative experiences. The content of the positive and negative experiences were related to characteristics of the child welfare workers, the quality of the relationship, the help offered and the parent's feelings of insecurity and fear. New CWS users tended to view the contact as more positive than the more experienced ones. Practical implications are presented.     

The Effects of Computerization on Public Child Welfare Practice

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of a new and promising case-based management information system on child welfare case management practices in two California counties. The objectives were to measure the extent to which computerization affected casework practices and to identify factors that influenced the effects of computerization. An exploratory longitudinal one-group pre-post design was used. Contrary to expectations, few differences were found, although workers spent more time alone after implementation of the system. A key finding is that the amount of time that caseworkers spent with clients was not reduced by the computer system.