A fistful of euros: Is the German one‐euro job workfare scheme effective for participants?

Hohmeyer K, Wolff J. A fistful of euros: is the German one‐euro job workfare scheme effective for participants? Welfare reforms have constituted a major policy issue in many OECD countries in recent decades. In Germany, a major reform in 2005 emphasised the activation of welfare recipients and introduced a workfare programme –‘One‐Euro Jobs’– on a large scale. In the present study, the impact of one‐euro jobs on the employment prospects of different groups of participants was estimated. The analysis was conducted on a large sample of welfare recipients using propensity score matching. The sample of one‐euro job participants and other welfare recipients was drawn from administrative records comprising all those who started their participation in the programme in early 2005. Our results showed that participation slightly improved the medium‐term employment prospects for women but not for men. Participation reduced the employment rate of participants younger than 25 years but raised it for some of the older participant groups. In conclusion, one‐euro jobs are effective for participants who have been jobless for several years but ineffective for participants who were recently employed.     

Points System:An Universal Beneficial System with Multiple Objectives of Reform on Household Registration System

Reform of China's Household Registration system(HRS) has been entering a new stage and deserves us to research.The paper argues that reform of HRS should have multiple objectives.It examines various local efforts and practices of the reform and claims that the point system is one of the most feasible alternative systems for the HRS that can fit those multiple reform objectives.The system could also be treated as the new institutional basic for public welfare provision and rights allocation,and a new governance means for population issues as well in China's transitional period.     

Anticipating modernity: the Jewish ‘welfare state’ in biblical and medieval times

The impact of religion on social policies and its role in the development, structuring and functioning of welfare states has only recently attracted significant attention. Studies of the relationship between religion and the welfare state have given little consideration to whether the religious precepts and values of the major religions, and the ways of life which they have shaped, are consistent with the idea of the welfare state. This paper shows that the elements of the definition of the modern welfare state were reflected in Jewish communal life as either prescribed by Jewish law (halakha) or lived during both ancient and medieval times, and that communal life was ‘welfare‐state‐like‘. In doing so this paper demonstrates that the idea of the welfare state is consistent with Judaism.     

中国拆船业的发展对策

随着国际拆船业持续繁荣,拆船大国之间的竞争越来越激烈。如何促进中国拆船业的发展,提升其国际竞争力成为亟待解决的问题。首先阐述中国拆船业的发展历程,然后对影响中国拆船业发展的因素进行分析,并运用状态空间模型预测未来两年世界和中国拆船业的发展状况,进而提出促进中国拆船业健康发展的相关建议。     

从学理到实践:爱国主义定义的结构性解析

如何界定爱国主义这一定义一直是学术界讨论的问题。《〈中共中央宣传部教育部关于进一步加强和改进高等学校思想政治理论课的意见〉实施方案》实施后,《思想道德修养与法律基础》教材不再运用列宁关于爱国主义的定义,而用了一个新的定义。科学地理解爱国主义不仅是爱国主义本质的内在要求,而且是理性爱国主义教育的前提。从“非人民群众”的爱国情感、“祖国”与“国家”的关系、爱国主义“理性”与“非理性”的关系三个角度进行探讨,认为社会主义国家应倡导理性爱国主义。     

Responding to child deaths: the work of Australia's Victorian Child Death Review Committee

The Victorian Child Death Review Committee (VCDRC) in Australia is a multidisciplinary Ministerial Advisory Committee established to review the deaths of children either currently child protection clients or known to the statutory child protection system. The Committee provides advice about each child death as well as insights into what are the surrounding patterns and issues. Key to this role is examining the contribution of the service sectors to the protection of children and the routine practices that are in place to respond to children and vulnerability. This paper provides a snapshot of the cases referred to the VCDRC and the key messages for practice drawn from them. What emerges is that often the threshold for when statutory child protection services must be involved in child and family matters can be ambiguous and that agreement about intervention, the level and nature of need or risk, and when cumulative harm and neglect require statutory responses are not always shared between agencies. It is clear that the lack of common frameworks about what constitutes child protection intervention challenges services. It is recommended that there be and used agreed definitions and frameworks to ensure shared understandings and collaborative responses across the service and legal systems.     

From advocacy to service provision: state transformation and the disability rights movement in Taiwan

This research uses the development of the disability rights movement in Taiwan as a case study to analyze the impact of state transformation, in particular marketization of social welfare policy, on the disability rights movement. First, the institutionalization of the disability rights movement enabled it to expand its organizational structure and become involved in shaping policy. Secondly, when disability rights organizations started to undertake state-funded projects, their focus shifted from advocacy to service provision. Thirdly, competition for limited state-funding gave the organizations led by urban-middle class advocates a significant advantage over small, community-based NPOs and gathered significantly greater resources. Finally, this paper suggests that, in a context in which the state did not provide basic social services for its citizens with disabilities, the institutionalization of SMOs turned advocacy groups into service providers. Although the number of disability civic organizations increased, the voices of advocacy groups were weakened.     

Global Governance and State Governance: Two Strategic Considerations in Contemporary China

Governance is a kind of holistic governance and the notion of governing holistically should be established. The holisticity of governance is reflected in the unity and coordination between value rationality and instrumental rationality, normative appeal and practical appeal as well as global governance and state governance. Global and state governances are two strategic considerations in contemporary China. Actively participating in global governance and rationally promoting state governance is the rational choice of contemporary China, which plays a unique and significant role in realizing the social transformation and national rejuvenation and modernization of contemporary China. Deepening state governance with the help of global governance and promoting global governance with the support of state governance is the basic idea and dimension of understanding and grasping the interaction, coordination and overall planning between the two. The restrictions and effects of global governance on state governance are mainly reflected in such considerations as objects, mechanisms, concepts and interests of governance, and modernization of state governance system and improvement of governance capacity can promote and deepen global governance in a more effective way.     

四级样态:高校对接"四种形态"的"度"

高校是“立德树人”培养高素质人才的基地，始终坚持在党的领导下办好中国特色社会主义高校，需要在思想和行动上执行好“四种形态”。正确认识当前高校践行“四种形态”存在的“精细治理”“文化管理”“经验管束”“粗放管理”等“四级样态”，对于高校党组织更好推进“四种形态”在高校落地生根具有重要意义     

Work as a cure for mental illnesses? Opportunism and seeking ways in psychology and psychiatry in the first decades of state socialism in Hungary

ABSTRACT

In Hungary, until the end of the 1940s, there were two main established methods of occupying the mentally ill who were fit for work. From the end of the nineteenth century, a lesser number of patients underwent work therapy in mental asylums, whereas the others were treated with so-called family therapy (otherwise known as the heterofamilial system), exploiting the capacities of families in the countryside. As an important part of this, the mentally ill helped in housekeeping and agricultural work. However, following the political and ideological turn of 1948, the latter form of treatment became debated, and then it was gradually superseded. Parallel to this process, work therapy came to be the most popular type of treatment for mental illnesses, as work formed the basis of the ideology of the communist state, and thus, healing through work harmonized with the general tendencies of the era. This article examines texts related to work therapy published in neurological–psychiatric and psychological journals and monographs between 1954 and 1964. However, although work therapy appeared to be the “handmaiden of ideology,” and even though it was supposed to fulfil a particular role, in reality, the role and perception of work therapy were a lot more complicated.