Poverty,Government Policy and Public Opinion in Britain and Israel: A Comparative Analysis

What are the effects of public opinion on social welfare policies? To what extent is increased financial strain associated with stronger support for anti‐poverty policies? This article tests welfare state theory by comparing poverty, government policy and public opinion on poverty in the UK and Israel, based on rich and detailed comparable survey data on the conditions of the poor in both countries. The results show that, despite similar levels of income poverty and inequality, the poor have a considerably lower standard of living in Israel than the UK. There is considerably greater public support for the poor in Israel but limited government action to end poverty, whereas in the UK there is more limited public support for the poor but significant government action on poverty and exclusion. In both countries there appears to be only a limited connection between social solidarity with the poor and the political elite's rhetoric and action.     

Income support for Australian carers since 1983: social justice,social investment and the cloak of gender neutrality

Income support for carers has been available in Australia since the early 1980s. In contrast to most other forms of income support, eligibility for Carer Payment has been progressively expanded in recent years, and increasing numbers of carers are claiming the payment as a result. This article examines the history of income support for carers by reviewing changes in eligibility criteria in the social security legislation and considering how those changes were framed. We argue that reforms to carers' income support have developed within competing frames of social justice and social investment, with an increasing emphasis on a social investment discourse, which prioritises paid work over care. Neither of the dominant frames addresses gender equality, and in practice, income support policy has reinforced familial (women's) responsibility for caring. Given the gendered nature of caring in Australia, gender equality issues must be considered in future policy reforms to ensure that the competing pressures on women to care and to engage in paid work do not lead to greater disadvantage and inequality for women and the people for whom they care.     

Tensions and contradictions in Australian social policy reform: compulsory Income Management and the National Disability Insurance Scheme

This paper explores contemporary contradictions and tensions in Australian social policy principles and governmental practices that are being used to drive behavioural change, such as compulsory income management. By means of compulsory income management the Australian Government determines how certain categories of income support recipients can spend their payments through the practice of quarantining a proportion of that payment. In this process some groups in the community, particularly young unemployed people and Indigenous Australians, are being portrayed as requiring a paternalistic push in order to make responsible choices. The poverty experienced by some groups of income support recipients appears to be seen as a consequence of poor spending patterns rather than economic and social inequalities. By contrast, Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has been constructed as a person centred system of support that recognises the importance of both human agency and structural investment to expand personal choices and control. Here we look at the rationale guiding these developments to explore the tensions and contradictions in social policy more broadly, identifying what would be required if governments sought to promote greater autonomy, dignity and respect for people receiving income support payments in Australia.     

Using a budget standards approach to assess the adequacy of newstart allowance

A budget standard indicates how much a particular family living in a particular place at a particular time needs to achieve a particular standard of living. The budget includes every item that is needed to satisfy the family's individual and collective needs, priced in current retail outlets. The approach has strong intuitive appeal because it reflects how actual families do their budgeting and has been used to assess the adequacy of a wide variety of incomes and costs. This article presents new budget standards for a range of unemployed families derived from the estimates produced in the 1990s, revised to reflect new data, improved research methods and changed circumstances. The new estimates are deliberately conservative and indicate how much is needed to achieve the Minimum Income for Healthy Living standard developed by UK public health researchers. They indicate that the current level of Newstart Allowance – the main form of income support for the unemployed – is woefully inadequate. The methods used to derive the budgets have been chosen so that others can vary some of the key assumptions (e.g., about housing costs) to tailor the budgets to fit specific applications.     

Determining Semi-Normative Poverty Lines Using Social Survey Data

Debates about how to set minimum income standards for health and general well-being are very current in Britain. Family budget standards remain popular but the results can be criticized for being little more than abstractions. They are to an extent 'artificial' and this raises questions about their 'real adequacy'. Another way to operationalize adequacy of income, in a lived sense, is to consider the household income levels at which a specified, desirable, healthy standard of living is in fact achieved, indicated here by diet and nutrition. Data are taken from the United Kingdom's Expenditure and Food Survey; the sample has been restricted to an older population, and three years of data (2002–5) provided a combined sample of 4,300 households. The study findings and semi-normative poverty lines are critically discussed in relation to the national UK policy context as well as the international research literature on poverty measurement.     

Lone Parent Activation in Ireland: Putting the Cart before the Horses?

Lone parents and their children are the biggest group at risk of living in poverty in Ireland, and activation is regarded as the solution to this problem by policymakers. While workfare requirements are now placed on lone parents whose youngest child is aged 14 or over, we question the capacity of the current activation policy to deliver an adequate income for these families. Drawing on evidence from other countries and the current Irish context, we argue that the absence of tailored support for lone parents, low levels of educational attainment, difficulties with childcare, the efficacy of financial supports to provide income adequacy and the failure to take into consideration their parenting responsibility mean that the implementation of the policy is fraught with difficulty.     

Between Activation and Supporting Women – Alternative Operation of Welfare‐to‐work Programmes

With the emergence of activation policies, researchers are intrigued by the extent to which welfare‐to‐work (WTW) programmes reflect the ideological orientation of policymakers, while leaving the ideological orientation of their operators unexamined. This aspect may be of particular importance when women's non‐governmental organizations operate non‐coercive WTW programmes. Directing attention to the contribution of the operator, we ask how women who operate these programmes distinguish between the feminist goal of increasing women's independent access to material resources, and the activation rhetoric of ‘work first’. Moreover, as not enough is known about how participants benefit from the incongruence between the feminist discourse and the activation one, scholarship contemplating women's resistance to WTW programmes remains focused on specific welfare histories, and this form of feminist work remains neglected. The importance of the specific operators and the policy implications of the benefits of feminist operation of WTW programmes receive attention in the study reported on herein. We used a non‐coercive activation programme operated by a feminist organization in Israel (among other operators) as an opportunity to deepen our understanding of how programme trainers voice their position between feminism and activation discourse, and how their form of speech enables participants to insist on decent employment as a policy issue. Implications for policy are discussed.     

从“收入维持”到“资产建设”：我国最低生活保障制度的完善

我国的最低生活保障制度实行多年以来,在缓解贫困、保持社会稳定等方面发挥了积极作用。但是以收入为基础的现金和财务补贴只能维持基本的生活而无法摆脱贫困,并且出现了诸多的问题。资产建设已经成为扶贫政策新的走向,通过资产视角分析最低生活保障制度的弊端,探讨在巩固收入补贴政策基础上,将资产建设嵌入最低生活保障制度是对该制度的完善。     

Making ends meet: perceptions of poverty in Sweden

During the era after the Second World War, Sweden has built a welfare system based on labor market participation and income maintenance. Low unemployment and decent wages are supposed to guarantee people a labor market income or income maintenance, which in turn should provide a proper standard for everyone. However, a rapid increase in unemployment and economic problems have made the future of the Swedish welfare state more uncertain than ever. These circumstances have, among other things, led to the suggestion that Sweden should abandon the income maintenance policy and create a social policy system with the more limited ambition of guaranteeing everyone a minimum income. In that case, one central question must be answered: what constitutes a decent minimum income in today's Sweden? Where should we draw the poverty line under which people will not be forced to live? These questions are central in the current debate. The consensual poverty line method is used in this article to derive a poverty line relevant for today's Sweden. The results shows that more than every fifth household has an income below the consensual poverty line. That is, they have an income that most Swedes would argue is too low to make ends meet. The level of the consensual poverty line was compared with the National Board of Health and Welfare's guidelines for social assistance. The consensual poverty line was shown to be more generous to small households and the norm for social assistance was more generous to larger households. Finally, the expenditure for guaranteeing all Swedish household a minimum income equal to the consensual poverty line was estimated: more than SEK 25 billion per year. The results in the article casts serious doubt on the ability of the Swedish welfare state to secure a decent income to all citizens.     

From Enlightened Self‐interest to Welfare Coalitions: Overcoming Identity‐based Tensions in the Israeli Welfare State

A common argument in the social policy literature is that ethnic and identity‐based heterogeneity undermines the welfare state. In part, this happens because of difficulties in the generation of broad social solidarity in diverse societies: solidarity which is allegedly necessary for sustaining public support for the welfare state. This study explores this argument's logic in the context of welfare state politics in Israel. Israel would appear to be a near‐perfect example of how heterogeneity strains social solidarity and, in turn, undermines the welfare state. Quite differently from most studies, however, this work's emphasis is not on public attitudes or voting, but on the political interaction between economically disadvantaged identity‐based minorities – specifically Arabs on the one hand and religious Jews on the other – in the welfare field. It is argued that shared interests enable extensive co‐operation among political elites in the welfare field despite religiously‐ and nationally‐based antagonism.     

Monitoring Income Maintenance Policies for Single Mothers

The Supporting Parent's Benefit was introduced in 1973 in an atmosphere of controversy. It provided Australian government support for certain low income groups of mothers with dependent children, for the first time. An attempt has been made in this study to assess the impact of long term income maintenance on these hitherto unsupported mothers. Changes in the population of beneficiaries have been monitored by analysing annual aggregate figures taken at 30 June for the years 1974 to 1979 which were provided by the Department of Social Security. The non-married subgroup which is the largest group of mothers and children is of particular interest. Claims that adolescents have been encouraged to take on the care of their ex-nuptial children simply because financial support is available are not substantiated. However, it is evident that, for more than half the total number of ex-nuptial mothers, Supporting Parent's Benefit must be relied on for a period of many years. This study indicates that this subgroup generally have fewer material resources than the married supporting mothers so that the long term effects of long term low income existence on mothers and children needs to be known in order to gauge the overall results of the introduction of the benefit. The question why some ex-nuptial mothers become independent of support quickly and others do not merits further investigation as it may provide important clues to ways of improving the benefit program.     

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.     

Distributive Justice and Social Policy: Some Reflections on Rawls and Income Distribution

This paper adapts the Rawlsian idea of decision making behind the veil of ignorance in the realm of income transfer systems. As rational decision makers, we would plan a society where the incidence of poverty is low, differences in the level of living between life cycles are small, income differences between the rich and poor are modest, income mobility from poverty to non-poverty is high, and where the living standard of the poor is decent. The results show that income mobility is not greater in those countries which have wide income differences, nor is the situation of the poor any better in countries with huge income disparities than in other countries. Cross-national comparisons indicate that high poverty rates are not associated with more rapid income mobility and higher standards for the poor.     

From industrial restructuring to the financial crisis: Mainstream nationalism and minimum income in the Basque Country

The uneven development of minimum incomes in Spain is one of the factors that explain the significant differences in the poverty indicators that characterize the Spanish regions, generally in favour of the territories most committed to these policies (Basque Country, Navarra and Asturias). However, there are other aspects that deserve some consideration when interpreting the specific method of developing minimum incomes in southern Europe. One aspect has to do with the differing dynamics of countries, such as Spain and Italy, which have opted for a decentralized regional model. In this regard, the regional autonomous initiative of the Basque Country played a decisive role in promoting minimum income programs in the late 1980s. Without its leadership in the launch of the regional minimum income policy, Spanish trade unions would probably not have opted for this method as a mechanism for combating poverty in the 1990s. No Italian region went on to play this driving role at that time. This article analyses the ideological foundations of the Basque minimum income policy introduced in the late 1980s and which grew significantly before and during the crisis that started in 2007-2008. It examines the dominant political narrative on this issue by analysing the discourse of some of the key nationalist leaders involved in the birth and development of the minimum income scheme. The approach shows that the experience of social decline linked to industrial restructuring processes was instrumental in the construction of the nationalist narrative.     

Another legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic: Income divergence

The uneven economic recovery from the pandemic-induced global recession of 2020 is expected to disrupt a multi-decade trend of per capita income convergence between advanced and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). This stands in contrast to the global recession following the global financial crisis. Should downside risks to the global recovery, in particular financial market stress, materialize, they are likely to set back growth in EMDEs more than in advanced economies in part because of the more limited policy space remaining in EMDEs, and would further widen per capita income divergence.     

Defamilization/familization measures and women's pension income—The case of Taiwan

This paper examines how defamilization and familization measures can affect women's capacity to accumulate pension income and their subsequent standard of living after retirement. Firstly, it highlights the concepts of defamilization and familization and discusses the potential of these measures in assisting women to save pension income through the “commodification” and “decommodification” of labor. Secondly, it examines the major pension policies and examples of defamilization and familization measures in Taiwan. It shows how the current limited provision of such measures could create “double jeopardy” for women, affecting access to paid employment or resources to enable women who wish to undertake caring responsibilities to do so, ultimately impacting their capacity to accumulate pension income. Thirdly, it suggests ways to strengthen defamilization and familization measures in order to enable women to accumulate sufficient retirement income on the basis of three preconditions: policy attention to the reciprocal relationship between familization/defamilization measures and pension schemes for women; a recognition of differences between women in their preferred strategies to accumulate pension income; and an emphasis on a life course perspective to understand the double jeopardies faced by women in saving for retirement.     

Low‐Income Students and College Attendance: An Exploration of Income Expectations*

Objectives. Some have hypothesized that unrealistic expectations regarding their futures may explain the weak link between expectations and realizations among low‐income (particularly minority) youth. Unfortunately, there is little evidence characterizing students' expectations around the time that they make college decisions that would allow one to study this hypothesis. Methods. In this exploratory article, I analyze data on income expectations from a small sample of low‐income minority high school seniors in Baltimore City, MD; and use data from Dominitz and Manski's sample of higher‐income white students in Madison, WI, and the NELS88 for comparisons. Results. I find little evidence that the income expectations of lower‐income minority students are so different from those of higher‐income students. Rather, the expected returns to postsecondary education appear similar between the two samples of high school seniors. Analysis of a nationally representative sample of high school seniors suggests that lower‐income students do not place less weight on expected economic returns to college when making their plans than do more advantaged students, although low‐income students are less able to translate their college plans into actual college attendance. Conclusions. These results suggest that differing income expectations do not explain the weaker relationship between expectations and educational attainment among low‐income students.     

The normalisation of income management in Australia: analysis of the parliamentary debates of 2007 and 2009–10

Initially introduced as part of Australia's Northern Territory Intervention in 2007, Income Management (IM) explicitly targeted inhabitants of remote NT Indigenous communities. IM is a form of welfare conditionality that involves compulsorily ‘quarantining’ at least half of individuals' social security income. It has been heavily criticised for being racist, discriminatory, and a violation of individual rights. The introduction of New Income Management (NIM) in 2010 extended IM beyond Indigenous communities and introduced a new set of eligibility criteria that shifted the focus of IM from Indigenous people to working age recipients of social security income. This in depth study of the early parliamentary debates on the compulsory IM programs traces the patterns of political discourse that led to IM coming to be seen by many policy makers as a normal and legitimate technique within Australian social policy. Situating the IM programs within neoliberal concerns about welfare dependency and active citizenship, this article argues that the introduction of NIM heralded a shift from a conception of IM as part of a focused social experiment targeted at remote Indigenous communities to a potentially mainstream social policy option.     

An exploratory study of basic income fidelity index

There is growing interest in adopting basic income as a new social protection policy in many countries. South Korea is no exception. There have been heated discussions on the benefits and costs of adopting basic income as a universal income support program among policy makers and academics in South Korea. However, one of the problems in the discourse of basic income discussion in South Korea has been a lack of clear definition of basic income. In this study, we develop a basic income fidelity index (BIFI) that can be applied to basic income programs to show how fully a program fits to the basic income concept. Such an index can be useful in making the terminologies and concepts of basic income clearer. We test feasibility of BIFI by applying it to four different case examples of basic income; Alaska Permanent Fund, UK Child Trust Fund, Switzerland’s Basic Income Plan, and Finland’s Basic Income Experiment. We show BIFI can be a useful tool to differentiate various types of basic income. It can be also used to identify strengths and weaknesses of a basic income scheme.     

唐代物价制定及其作用

在唐代,市估不但对官方行为具有强制性作用,是官方买卖、收付折算、平赃定罪、控制物价必须依据的价格标准;对一般民间(私人)交易也有着不同程度的约束(指导、调节)作用,且在有人请求、发生争执、立券公证等情况下也不排除依市估而定。笔者以为对唐代国家的物价管理政策及“官市依估,私但两和”的交易原则,不宜做绝对性理解。