Between Poor Relief and Human Capital Investments – Paradoxes in Hybrid Social Assistance

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are often being promoted for their simultaneous advantages of short‐term income protection and long‐term human capital investments. Yet, existing evaluations have largely failed to test the underlying programme theory, and few empirical case studies have explored inherent contradictions and ambiguous consequences of this hybrid approach. To further understand the programmes' social policy implications, this study identifies and analyzes such ambiguities and paradoxical consequences in the case of Uruguay's CCT‐programme, Asignaciones Familiares (AFAM). Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with beneficiaries and members of the commission who designed the programme, this study reveals major paradoxes in AFAM's design and implementation caused by various endogenous factors. Relevant to social policy in general, and CCT‐evaluations in particular, findings also indicate that the hybrid social assistance approach may have perverse effects on the programme's twin objectives.     

贫困缺口总指数的构造、分解与应用

本文构造了一个新贫困指数 ,通过对 指数的因素分解及衍生指数的构造,提出了一些重要贫困指标的预测和推算办法。基于CHNS1991-2011年跨度20年的8轮调查数据进行实证分析,结果表明,我国农村近20年来总贫困缺口率呈现年均6.39%的缩减率,其贡献全部来自贫困人口总规模递减这一因素的影响,而另外两个因素,即平均贫困缺口水平和贫困差异度则呈现年均小幅上升趋势,表明减贫质量不容乐观;以现有减贫模式对我国农村2020年的平均贫困缺口水平、贫困不平等程度、贫困规模等指标进行预测显示,减贫目标依然任重道远;提出了采用精准减贫,重心在于提升贫困人口获取收入的能力和缩小贫困不平等程度的相关建议。     

教育改善贫困效应的地区异质性研究

教育对于增加收入、改善贫困无疑是一个重要的途径。在目前多维贫困越来越受到重视的情况下,本文在收入贫困和多维贫困两种贫困识别标准下,分析了教育改善贫困的效应在地区之间的异质性,考察了该效应是否受地区经济发展的影响。根据分层LOGIT模型的估计,本文认为地区经济发展水平是发挥教育改善收入贫困效应的重要舞台,对于多维贫困的改善效应则不明显。本文得到的一个重要扶贫政策建议是要发挥教育改善贫困的效应,必须注重精准扶贫与发展地区经济相结合;但仅仅发展经济,不一定能保证教育对多维贫困的改善效应,减轻多维贫困需要更加重视公共产品供给和民生保证。     

移民分类研究

移民是自人类社会诞生以来从未间断过的世界范围内的人口迁移现象。移民有三个基本内涵和维度,一是空间维度,二是时间维度,三是数量维度。移民问题历来受到广泛关注和重视。在简要概括国际国内移民历史,梳理移民内涵的基础上,从移民迁移区域、主观意愿、诱导因素、移民开发目的等划分标准对移民类型进行了进一步分类,并对相应移民类型做简要说明和典型案例补充。     

西部民族地区反贫困法律制度构建

反贫困法律制度的建立与完善契合了经济法的社会整体利益,凸显了经济法社会责任本位的实质内容,亦为构建和谐社会的基石。我国反贫困的嬗变历程表明贫困地区正在缩小范围,然而西部民族地区反贫困形势仍然严峻,反贫困法律制度严重欠缺,需构建科学合理的反贫困法律制度体系,确保西部民族地区反贫困工作的顺畅运行。     

Symbiosis of Microcredit and Private Moneylending in Cambodia

Microcredit's potential for poverty reduction is a highly contested issue. In Cambodia, the dramatically increasing commercial microcredit coexists with widespread private moneylending. These two practices are rooted in different economic world views: neoliberalism on the one hand, and the traditional Khmer economic sociality permeated by patronage on the other. The ethnography shows that far from competing with each other, microcredit and private lending have adapted to form a symbiotic relationship, and much private lending is financed through microcredit. While microcredit is often beneficial to people living well above the poverty line, the widespread access to credit, through microloans as well as private lending, is threatening the livelihoods of the economically most vulnerable and precipitating their social, economic and spatial exclusion from their local communities. In contrast to the social and economic exclusion caused by land grabbing and forced evictions, which has received a fair amount of public attention, exclusion as a consequence of indebtedness has, for sociocultural reasons, remained much less visible.     

The Passing Scene

No abstract available for this article.     

Involving Services Users in Social Work Training on the Reality of Family Poverty: A Case Study of a Collaborative Project

In the last five years there has been an increased drive to include the perspectives and contributions of service users in social work education in the United Kingdom. In this paper we discuss the experience of one project that attempted to bring together service users, academics and practitioners to jointly develop and deliver a module that sought to examine the perspectives of families living in poverty who were in receipt of children and families social work services. Through doing this it was hoped that it would be possible to raise practitioners’ awareness of how poverty impacts on parenting and how they could develop an approach that was non‐punitive and genuinely supportive. The paper starts by exploring the context of service user involvement in social work education and then describes the development and process of this collaborative project. The paper concludes with recommendations for both projects seeking to engage service users in empowering and meaningful ways, as well as social work practice within an anti‐oppressive framework.     

How Living Wage Legislation Affects U.S. Poverty Rates

I investigate how living wage legislation affects poverty. I find evidence that living wage ordinances modestly reduce poverty rates where such ordinances are enacted. However, there is no evidence that state minimum wage laws do so. The difference in the impacts of the two types of legislation conceivably stems from a difference in the party responsible for bearing the burden of the cost.

Marketing of Voluntary Organizations as Contract Providers of National and Local Government Welfare Services in the UK

Voluntary organisations have become major providers of numerous social welfare services that previously were supplied by the state. In Britain, between 35 and 40% of the average human services charity’s annual income now derives from government (predominantly local government) sources, meaning that the acquisition of fresh contracts to undertake government funded work, in conjunction with the maintenance of good relations with government funders vis-à-vis current assignments, is increasingly important for ensuring a human service charity’s financial survival. An organization that wishes to obtain new contracts and to keep government bodies satisfied with its present activities will need to market itself effectively. This empirical study examined two aspects of charity marketing relevant to this requirement: the extent to which voluntary organizations applied the principles of strategic account management (otherwise known as key account management) to their relations with government funders, and the organizational characteristics (passion and commitment, low wage costs, etc.) that they emphasized to government bodies when making bids. A number of organizational variables (e.g., mission rigidity, strategic intent, short term operational focus) were employed in regression analyses as possible determinants of: (i) the degree to which a charity used strategic account management; and (ii) the genres of the organizational characteristics that it accentuated when tendering for government funded work.