Accumulation of Welfare Problems in a Longitudinal Perspective

In this article we study the bias caused by the conventional retrospective measurement of parental high cultural activities in the effects of parental high cultural activities and educational attainment on son’s or daughter’s high cultural activities. Multi-informant data show that there is both random measurement error and correlated error in the respondent’s report of parental high cultural activities. Correlated measurement error is the consequence of the fact that adult children who have higher rates of high cultural activities, report higher levels of parental cultural activities than the parents themselves do. When controls for both types of measurement error are included in structural models, the total intergenerational effect of parental high cultural activities appears to be larger than in a model without controls for measurement error, but the direct intergenerational effect is not biased if educational attainment is controlled for. The effect of educational attainment on high cultural activities is larger in models that correct for measurement error. In addition, the effect of educational attainment is stronger than the effect of parental high cultural activities, both with and without correction for measurement error.

Welfare Participation and Time Use in China

Using the newly available China Family Panel Studies 2010 survey data and a propensity score matching method, this study examines the possible influence of participation in China’s primary welfare program, Dibao, on household head’s time use pattern in both urban and rural areas. We find that Dibao lowered recipients’ time spent on various leisure and social activities and increased their time spent on unspecified activities or being idle for both urban and rural residents. Urban Dibao recipients also tended to spend less time on education activities, while rural Dibao recipients spent less time on work activities but more time on personal care and household activities. These findings provide pioneering evidence on the possible link between welfare participation and time use patterns in the global welfare literature. As Dibao continues to expand, the empirical evidence from this article suggests that Dibao might have some unintended adverse effects on recipients, including less time spent on leisure and social activities, reduced time on work and education activities, and more time on being idle. Future reforms of Dibao and its supplementary policies and programs need to consider how best to promote both the economic and holistic well-being of the participants.

     

Cumulative Disadvantage and Connections Between Welfare Problems

In this paper, we perform a latent class factor analysis of a panel that involves two waves of data from an annual survey of living conditions in Sweden that were gathered in the years 1994–1995 and 2002–2003. We follow the same 3,149 individuals over both waves, describing them by sex, age group, family type, nationality background, education level and socio-economic class. Further, since the welfare disadvantages included in the analysis are chronic unemployment, economic problems, health problems, experiences of threat or violence, crowded housing, lack of a close friend and sleeping problems, we also have data on exactly which welfare problems each individual in the data set suffers from. In the empirical analysis, latent class factor analysis provides us not only with information on which individual characteristics that are important in the accumulation of welfare problems, but also gives us information on which disadvantages in fact are accumulated. First, we find that welfare problems do cluster. Second, the welfare problems that most often appear at a factor level with several disadvantages are experiences of threat or violence and sleeping problems. Finally, being an immigrant and being single are individual characteristics that turn up most often in factor levels with problem accumulation, whereas there is no distinctive difference between the sexes. However, women seem to be more prone to suffer from experiences of threat or violence and sleeping problems, while men are more likely to suffer from lack of a close friend.     

Welfare Regimes and Welfare Opinions: a Comparison of Eight Western Countries

Social Indicators Research -     

福利的行政化与政治化

文章回顾了福利国家行政机构的建立,讨论了福利国家内部的政治运作和政治程序,分析了“社会价值”的性质和力量。文章指出,福利国家是行政主义的国家,它的行政机制改变了国家内部的社会和生产关系。福利国家将很多矛盾内部化,进而通过政策制定和政策程序来解决政治问题,福利政治是政策化的政治。在福利国家建设过程中形成的“社会权利”观念也是一种政治力量,它的压力可以削减福利国家内部的商业力量,推动国家干预的发展。但是,经济全球化带来的经济压力正在挑战“社会权利”的传统意义。文章认为,考察福利国家的运作和走向,福利政治是一个不可或缺的角度。     

Income Inequality and Persistence Changes

Social Indicators Research - This paper carries out a time series analysis of the Gini coefficient for disposable income in a sample that includes both advanced and emerging economies. Our results...     

Welfare reform and female headship

While much of the focus of recent welfare reforms has been on moving recipients from welfare to work, many reforms were also directed at decisions regarding living arrangements, pregnancy, marriage, and cohabitation. This article assesses the impact of welfare reform waivers and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs on women's decisions to become unmarried heads of families, controlling for confounding influences from local economic and social conditions. We pooled data from the 1990, 1992, 1993, and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which span the period when many states began to adopt welfare waivers and to implement TANF, and estimated logit models of the incidence of female headship and state-stratified, Cox proportional hazard models of the rates of entry into and exit from headship. We found little consistent evidence that waivers affected female headship of families.     

Welfare reform and immigrant fertility

Immigration policy is at the forefront of US policy discussions, and the use of welfare benefits by immigrants has been hotly debated. In 1996, Congress enacted welfare reform legislation, which imposed strict restrictions on welfare eligibility for noncitizens. However, a number of states restored access to welfare benefits to immigrants that had been cut out in the federal welfare reform law. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we examine whether immigrant women adjusted their childbearing in response to changes in the generosity of welfare benefits at the state-level. We find that noncitizen women reduced their fertility in response to cutbacks imposed by the legislation. Our findings, which prove robust to a number of identification and robustness checks, underscore how immigrants respond to state-level policies and provide insight into the potential impacts of comprehensive immigration reform, particularly the components related to the path to citizenship and access to public benefits.     

从瑞典福利制度看北欧福利国家模式

北欧国家形成的“斯堪的纳维亚福利模式”一直受到世界的瞩目,该模式以社会再分配作为基石,通过大面积的普遍性公共资助计划给予国民基本的社会福利,同时辅之以社会保险和社会救助。在分析北欧国家的福利制度时,最重要的一点是区分普遍性的公共资助计划、真正意义上的社会保险和社会救助三者之间的界限以及模糊地带。本文旨在通过对瑞典福利制度的介绍,透视整个北欧国家的福利模式。     

甘肃省近百年来人口分布的时空变化分析

文章依据近百年来分区域人口统计数据建立动态模型,分析甘肃省人口分布的时空变化特点。近百年来甘肃经济社会状况的巨变引起75个县的人口密度和人口比重的变化,特别是以兰州市为重心的陇中地区人口比重持续上升,反映了工业化、城镇化过程对人口分布的集中效应;而陇南地区在人口密度快速增加的同时人口比重持续下降,反映了资源环境对人口增长的约束。各地区的人口密度、人口比重与时间序列具有良好的相关性。     

The Relationship between Economic Development and Social Welfare: A New Adjusted GDP Measure of Welfare

Existing literature focuses on the issue ofpreparation of social welfare measurements onthe basis of an unadjusted Gross DomesticProduct (GDP). This paper extends this methodto incorporate cost-benefit analysis ofeconomic growth in a growing economy incalculating the adjusted GDP, termed as thecost-benefit (CB)-adjusted GDP. This approachis empirically applied to Thailand. There arestark differences between GDP per capita and CBadjusted GDP per capita rates for this period.This paper concludes that GDP can be used as anindicator of social welfare if the GDPestimates are undertaken within a cost-benefitanalysis framework.     

老年人口死亡概率时代变迁与老年定义的 重新思考

通过对1982-2010年间我国老年人口年龄别死亡概率的考察显示,近30年来我国老年人口的死亡概率随时间推移而不断降低,表明我国老年群体的健康状况和年龄内涵正在发生改变.与此同时,经济社会环境的变化和科学技术的发展极大地改变了老年人口的生活生产方式,也提供了更多的参与经济社会活动的能力与机会,从而使得后世代的老年人往往比前世代的老年人"更健康"、"更年轻",因此,有必要重新思考对老年人的传统定义.此外,中国老年人口死亡概率的变化也表现出明显的性别差异、地区差异以及与发达国家的差距,说明对中国来讲,要完成死亡模式的根本转化仍有很长的路要走.在充分认识这些差异性的基础上重新定义老年,将使得我们对老龄社会有一个全新的认识,也将有助于我们重构未来常态化老龄社会的公共政策体系.     

Welfare effects of illegal immigration

This paper analyzes the welfare effect of illegal immigration on the host country within a dynamic general equilibrium framework and shows that it is positive for two reasons. First, immigrants are paid less than their marginal product, and second, after an increase in immigration, domestic households find it optimal to increase their holdings of capital. It is also shown that dynamic inefficiency may arise, despite the fact that the model is of the Ramsey type. Nevertheless, the introduction of a minimum wage, which leads to job competition between domestic unskilled workers and immigrants reverses all of the above results.

Welfare Exit,Marriage, and Welfare Recidivism: A Reevaluation of Patterns of the 1980s and 1990s

We examine the relationship between marriage and welfare recidivism for women leaving a first welfare spell, using the 1979–2000 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Previous studies have found that women who marry around the time of welfare exit have lower rates of welfare return than women who stay single. However, more marriages occur before or after welfare exit than occur at the time of welfare exit. We find that marriages that precede or follow welfare exit by more than 12 months are not associated with significantly lower rates of welfare return. We also confirm previous findings that marriages formed within a year of welfare exit are associated with reduced rates of welfare return. However, these reduced rates mostly indicate later welfare returns rather than fewer welfare returns. Overall, our findings indicate a much weaker association between marriage and welfare independence than has been previously reported for this time period.     

Welfare benefits and birth decisions of never-married women

For some time now, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has been increasing rapidly in the United States. This has prompted several states to propose (and in some cases, enact) legislation to deny access to higher AFDC benefits for families in which the mother gives birth while receiving AFDC. The authors investigate whether AFDC benefit levels are systematically related to the family-size decisions of never-married women. Using a bivariate probit model with state and time fixed effects, applied to Current Population Survey data for the years 1980–1988, it is found that the basic benefit level for a family of two (one adult and one child) and the incremental benefit for a second child positively affects the family size decisions of black and Hispanic women, but not of white women. The effects are concentrated among high school dropouts (no effects are found for high school graduates). The authors conclude that rather than to uniformly deny benefits to all AFDC women that bear children, a better targeted policy might be to alter the AFDC benefit structure in such a way as to encourage single mothers to complete high school. However, being a high school dropout might be a proxy for some other underlying characteristic of the woman, and encouraging women to complete high school who otherwise would not might have no effect whatsoever on nonmarital births.     

Welfare reform and interstate migration of poor families

The thesis of this study is that as a result of increased inequalities in welfare rules, the 1996 welfare reform act not only enhanced incentives for poor families to move but also (and perhaps more important) created disincentives for them to stay in "race to the bottom" states. In testing this thesis, we evaluated the mediating and moderating roles of state economic development and family structure. We merged data from three main sources: the 1996-1999 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and state economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Modeling both destination (pull) and departure (push) effects of welfare policy measures and selected covariates in a nested discrete-time event-history migration analysis, we found robust support for the thesis that stringency in state welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules stimulated interstate out-migration of poor families in the United States. However poor families were not drawn to states with relatively more-lenient welfare rules, although stringency in state welfare dollar benefits inhibited in-migration and state unemployment patterns may have conditioned the migration effects of welfare-reform rules on the choice of destination. Single mothers were not more directly affected by welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules than were poor married couples.     

State-level Welfare Policies and Nonmarital Subsequent Childbearing

Using discrete time event history analyses of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine the association between state-level welfare waiver policies implemented before the 1996 welfare reform legislation and the risk of a nonmarital subsequent birth. Our study makes a unique contribution to the existing literature by using a national-level sample of unmarried mothers who ever received welfare. This high-risk sample represents the women of most interest to policymakers, as it is the exact group to whom welfare reform is targeted—welfare mothers at risk of having nonmarital additional births. The state policies we study include: family cap, earnings disregard, work exemptions, work requirements, and sanctions. We conclude that, although reducing the number of nonmarital births is a key goal of welfare reform, state-established welfare waiver policies do not have any influence on women’s childbearing behaviors in this sample, net of women’s individual characteristics and state economic environments. Even the family cap policy, which was designed for the sole purpose of reducing additional births, has no significant association with nonmarital subsequent childbearing. Instead, personal characteristics, not public policies, are stronger determinants of women’s childbearing decisions. Age, race/ethnicity, marital status, number of previous children, education level, and welfare receipt are significantly associated with nonmarital subsequent births. Overall, this paper contributes to an expanding body of research that shows minimal effects of welfare waivers on fertility. Our work suggests that more targeted policies are necessary to be able to influence individual family formation behaviors.     

An Assessment of Social Welfare in Spain: Territorial Analysis Using a Synthetic Welfare Indicator

The aim of this paper is measure social welfare in Spanish provinces. To achieve this, we use the distance method P₂ to compose a synthetic indicator of welfare for 2007, the last year for which data are available. The index comprises information on different social indicators from various life domains and enables a classification of Spanish provinces, as well as a study of the impact of each individual indicator in order to determine provincial disparities in social welfare levels.     

社会福利制度的理论框架

单独使用现有的任何一套社会福利理论框架,都无法使我们比较透彻地理解叠床架屋的社会福利体系.本文在逐一介绍和分析了三种主要的社会福利制度理论体系之后认为,这些理论在现实生活中存在着大量的交叉和重叠现象.如果换个角度,通过缴费和支付去观察具体的社会福利计划,就会发现,在社会再分配和个人缴费这两种主要的社会计划原则之间已经出现了越来越多的相互混合和互换的状态,社会政策领域中的意识形态分野也因而出现了混乱的局面.为了进一步探索社会福利制度的逻辑共性和经验共性,本文设计了一个多层福利理论框架,希望能为这方面的研究提供一个新的视角.     

Gender Difference in Sleep Problems: Focused on Time Use in Daily Life of Korea

Korea is well-known as one of the most sleepless country on the globe. Given the fact that sleep is closely connected with various health outcomes, we examined which group is more likely to experience sleep disorder problems within the context of time use. This study sets out to describe the differences in sleep disorder patterns between Korean men and women. In this study, we also tried to identify important socio-demoraphic factors and wake activity time use factors that might account for the sleep problem (short sleep/oversleep) and gender differences in sleep. Data from the original 2004 Korean Time Use Survey were used for this study (n = 16,958). Fifty-two percent of the respondents were women; the age range of the sample was 25–59 years. Results showed us that there was no gender differences found in dimension of short sleep. Still, women were less likely to be over sleeper rather than men, implying the existence of gender inequality in rest/free time. Results from the multinomial regression model showed that, although there were similarities in the impact of relevant factors, men’s sleep was more likely to be disturbed by their work role, while women’s sleep was affected by their work and family role. In this study, it was found that the gender difference in sleep problems was associated with time use, and especially the social roles that men and women occupied.