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Social protection has grown in importance in framing the relationship between citizens and states across much of Africa. Botswana's conservative welfare regime relies heavily on local officials – many of whom are trained social workers – to exercise discretion in assessing the needs of poor people and registering them on social protection programmes. Interviews with local officials reveal that they attribute poverty and destitution primarily to the deficient attitudes and behaviour of poor people. These are in turn seen as the consequence of social protection policies that disempower people by fostering 'dependence' on state provision. Local officials prefer programmes that 'empower' poor people. Whilst they recognise that the state has responsibilities towards the poor, they implement policies that reinforce and reproduce the status of poor citizens as often undeserving claimants on public charity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments and NGOs are switching to phone‐ and Internet‐based communication technologies to reduce costs and broaden access to public services. However, these technological shifts can backfire if they exacerbate administrative burden in high‐need communities. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in Greece evaluating which communication mode best allows disadvantaged groups to solicit information about free services. Subjects were 18 times more likely to use a prepaid postcard and eight times more likely to use a postcard requiring postage than a hotline or email to seek information about free dental care. Focus groups indicate that low self‐efficacy greatly limits disadvantaged groups' willingness to use newer technologies for bureaucratic inquiries. We demonstrate that the administrative burden associated with technological shifts is larger than previously believed and that widespread psychological barriers include not only the stigma of welfare receipt, but also the stigma of mishandling a conversation with a bureaucrat. Evidence for Practice: Scholarship on administrative burden underestimates both the magnitude and the types of challenges disadvantaged communities face when using new technologies to access free services.Even in high literacy countries with extensive Internet availability and widespread use of mobile phones for informal social communication, the switch to new technologies for aid provision creates major challenges for aid recipients.Although phone‐ and Internet‐based communication technologies reduce costs for service providers, they impose sizable psychological burdens on disadvantaged communities that often lack confidence and technical skills to use these technologies for formal, bureaucratic communications.When designing outreach programming, service providers should consider using postcards and similar tools that place minimal informational and technological demands on disadvantaged communities and avoid the potential for uncomfortable interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment had risen to historically high levels in Britain before the coronavirus crisis; however, whereas work is traditionally conceptualized as a route out of poverty, this is no longer necessarily the case. Participation in non‐standard or low‐income work such as zero‐hour contracts, involuntary part‐time work and self‐employment is increasingly a feature of the labour market and in‐work benefits which top‐up low incomes have been pared back. This case study undertaken in the period before the coronavirus crisis takes a multi‐disciplinary approach in relation to three key questions: are working women resorting to food bank use in times of financial hardship?; to what extent is this a function of non‐standard working practices?; and is welfare reform a contributing factor? A three‐strand approach is taken: a synthesis of literature, an analysis of national data and in‐depth interviews with stakeholders involved with referrals to or delivery of emergency food provision within northern Britain. The findings highlight a growth in precarious employment models since the 2008/2009 recession and how this intersects with increasing conditionality in welfare policy. We contribute to the debate by arguing that ideological driven policy fails to acknowledge structural deficiencies in labour market demand and misattributes responsibility for managing precarious working patterns onto individuals who are already struggling to get by. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of chronic poverty measures are now empirically applied to quantify the prevalence and intensity of chronic poverty, vis‐à‐vis transient experiences, using panel data. Welfare trajectories over time are assessed in order to identify the chronically poor and distinguish them from the non‐poor, or the transiently poor, and assess the extent and intensity of intertemporal poverty. We examine the implications of measurement error in the welfare outcome for some popular discontinuous chronic poverty measures, and propose corrections to these measures that seeks to minimize the consequences of measurement error. The approach is based on a novel criterion for the identification of chronic poverty that draws on fuzzy set theory. We illustrate the empirical relevance of the approach with a panel dataset from rural Ethiopia and some simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a rising tide of in‐work poverty, we need to reform universal credit so people can build a better life [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to analyze whether and to what extent welfare generosity moderates the risk of income poverty and material deprivation among disadvantaged groups, that is, people with ill health, low education and lack of employment. The data are based on the 2009 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (cross-sectional) surveys. The analyses comprise 27 and 28 European countries, including 292,874 and 302,343 individuals between 18 and 64 years of age. Multi-level analyses demonstrated that welfare generosity moderated the risk of both material deprivation and income poverty. With few exceptions, the risk decreased among disadvantaged groups in absolute terms. Among individuals who experienced the combinations of limiting long-standing illness and either low education or non-employment, the absolute inequalities in material deprivation decreased with increasing welfare generosity. Also, the absolute inequalities in income poverty among individuals who experienced the combination of limiting long-standing illness and low education were lower in more generous welfare contexts. Results indicated lower absolute levels of both material deprivation and income poverty among disadvantaged individuals in generous welfare states. However, for material deprivation the results were more substantial and consistent than for income poverty. Taken together, these findings support the view that generous welfare states reach the worst-off and are successful in buffering material deprivation and income poverty and, hence, in reducing social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the United States in the 1990s on voting among low-income women. Using the November Current Population Surveys with the added Voting and Registration Supplement for the years 1990 through 2004 and exploiting changes in welfare policy across states and over time, we estimate the causal effects of welfare reform on women's voting registration and voting participation during the period in which welfare reform unfolded. During this time period, voter turnout was decreasing in the United States. We find robust evidence that welfare reform led to smaller declines in voting (about 3 to 4 percentage points, which translates to about 10% relative to the baseline mean) for women who were exposed to welfare reform compared to several different comparison groups of similar women who were much less exposed. The robust findings suggest that welfare reform had prosocial effects on civic participation, as characterized by voting. The effects were largely confined to presidential elections, were stronger in Democratic than Republican states, were stronger in states with stronger work incentive policies, and appeared to operate through employment, education, and income. (JEL D72, H53, I38, J21) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a rational explanation for the redistribution paradox, whereby low-income individuals seeking more social security prefer a lower taxation although this might imply a reduced welfare. A simple model of tax transfer and redistribution is presented, with various agents facing two different unemployment probabilities. We investigate how the preferred tax rate changes with the probability of being unemployed. We show that, when the probability of unemployment for the less-skilled correlates negatively with that of the highly skilled, the relationship with the tax rate is not monotonic and depends on the level of risk aversion. This theoretical framework is confirmed in an empirical investigation based on microeconomic data, and in a robustness test based on macroeconomic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We approach the problems of measuring the dimensionality of welfare and that of identifying the multidimensionally poor, by first finding the poor using the original space of attributes, and then reducing the welfare space. The starting point is the notion that the "poor" constitutes a group of individuals that are essentially different from the "non-poor" in a truly multidimensional framework. Once this group has been identified through a clustering procedure, we propose reducing the dimension of the original welfare space using recent blinding methods for variable selection. We implement our approach to the case of Latin America based on the Gallup World Poll, which contains ample information on many dimensions of welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The working-class is typically regarded as the driving force of welfare state development. Yet, some argue that the middle-classes' beneficial involvement in the welfare state is crucial for its financial sustainability and popular legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how recent welfare state reforms in Germany which affect the status of the middle-class are viewed and discussed by this group. Germany is a particularly interesting case because its welfare state is seen to be centred on the desires of the middle-class, especially through its focus on status maintenance and horizontal redistribution over the life-course. However, the move from status maintenance to minimum income support in unemployment provision and the strengthening of private old age provision challenge this assumption. Thus, we ask how the German middle-class views the emerging abandonment of the principle of status maintenance and the shift from collective to individual responsibility. Based on qualitative material from focus groups, we find that individual responsibility is generally supported, but that the state is still assigned responsibility for providing basic levels of social security. Furthermore, for those groups seen as less capable of acting individually responsible (e.g. the poor or long-term unemployed) the 'inducement' of -- or assistance for -- individually responsible behaviour by the state is demanded. Overall, while the principle of 'individual responsibility' seems to find some resonance among the middle-class members interviewed, they still try to balance individual and collective responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses 30 accounts of income and expenditure left by Collectors for the Poor in Elizabethan England, before the period known as the old poor law. Collectors were appointed by parishes and incorporated boroughs in accordance with the poor laws of 1552 and 1563, but few of their fragile records survive. The accounts examined here document early use of compulsory rates to provide income, but several features of the distribution of relief differ from patterns common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adult male recipients outnumbered women in many of the parishes; children were frequently helped directly; and cities and towns assisted a smaller fraction of their total populations than did villages but awarded larger per capita payments. Accounts from the 10 villages and small towns analysed most fully show that Elizabethan Collectors were moving away from the late medieval practice of providing only occasional aid; increasingly they awarded regular payments to a selected subset of the local poor. Comparison with the early seventeenth century suggests that the poor laws of 1598 and 1601 contributed to a transition that was already underway but did not create a new system of relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper focuses on moments and spaces of encounter in which middle class people come into contact with 'poor others'. Much critical poverty work focuses on the re-inscription of difference across class, race and gender lines. We explore where, when and how middle class actors engage with 'poor others' in ways that (sometimes) lead to shifts in neoliberal and individualized understandings of poverty. Our paper explores boundary-breaking transformative moments that arise through spatial encounters. Drawing on Valentine's 'zones of encounter' we explore how middle class encounters with poverty are mediated by two sets of spatial processes: processes of (self)government and of radical contact. We draw illustrative examples from two projects: on rural poverty in the Pacific Northwest and on community development in Chicago. In each case we trace the ways in which these spaces of encounter foster governance and/or contact processes that reproduce or disrupt dominant discourses about poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review, we focus on current research on the major welfare program in the United States, food security programs, Social Security, Social Security Disability, Unemployment Insurance, child support, and tax provisions such as the Earned Income Tax Credit that provide substantial financial support for low-income households and other potentially vulnerable populations such as the elderly and the unemployed. Since many of these are programs specifically targeted at poor and low-income individuals, we also describe how poverty is defined in the United States, update readers on the ongoing debate over poverty measurement, and provide some comparison to how it is measured outside the United States. Looking across the various social policies addressed in this review and the associated recent research, one clear theme emerges: the United States is very concerned about work disincentives potentially embedded within these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Luther's theological and sacramental convictions shaped his commitments to social reform, especially the reform of social welfare and the distribution of money and goods in early modern northern Europe. His early critique of merchant capitalism, political lobbyists, and global economic monopolies prompts contemporary questions about the just distribution of wealth in a world where too many have too little. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an analysis of a 'sympathetic public' cohering around the U.S. welfare state's wreckage that is tuned to the material dimensions of emplacement. It does this through an exploration of efforts to bring a national public housing museum to Chicago. Museum supporters mobilized the properties of ruined public housing to summon affinities and identifications with the U.S. poor and to reconfigure public reckoning about poverty in the United States. The public examined here is an anticipated one. Conceptually, I depart from text-based understandings of publics and publicity. I follow how museum supporters sought to curate encounters with ruined housing in ways that would socialize beholders into the attentiveness necessary to reflect and act properly on poverty. The 'sympathetic' dimensions of this anticipated public operate on two levels. First, future visitors' identifications with the struggles of bygone residents would combat 'unsympathetic' representations of U.S. poor. Second, visceral contact with a place once inhabited by bygone residents would render contagious the perspectives, values, and practices they used to navigate social inequality and state-mediated neglect. The anticipated public then also anticipates the kind of citizenry capable of managing social protection at a 'postwelfare' moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, the historiography of poverty and welfare has moved decisively away from considerations of either black letter or case law, in favour of the study of the socio-cultural experiences of the poor themselves. This article uses a large corpus of pauper letters and other correspondence for a number of Midland counties to argue for a reconsideration of the place of the law in shaping pauper entitlements and beliefs. It argues that paupers had a keen appreciation of both black letter and case law and could rhetoricize this knowledge, bringing it to bear in their attempts to establish deservingness in a poor law system that offered no legal guarantees of relief. Even more importantly, paupers came to have detailed knowledge of the grey areas of the law, a territory on which they could exercise their own agency vis-à-vis officials. The article also tries to trace the genealogy of this legal knowledge, suggesting for instance that paupers shared a common linguistic and knowledge platform with officials and advocates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2000 and 2005, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, until recently, the Food Stamp Program) caseload increased by half. As the Great Recession unfolded, the SNAP caseload grew even more rapidly. Further, over the past two decades the composition of the caseload has shifted sharply away from families combining food and cash assistance and toward families receiving food assistance in the absence of any other major, means-tested income support. By analyzing components of the caseload separately, we provide new and more insightful estimates of the effects of food and cash assistance policies and the economy on both the change in the composition of the caseload and the large caseload swings over the 1990s and 2000s. We find that the economy can explain a portion of caseload changes, but not compositional shifts. Food and cash assistance policies help to explain both changes. In total, the combination of SNAP and welfare policy changes account for about half of the sharp increase since 1994 in the share of SNAP households receiving food, but not cash, assistance. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of welfare reform, many poor people have exhausted their benefits and must now live with less government support. While all of these former welfare recipients are struggling, some are experiencing housing problems that are quite severe. This article uses survey data on former welfare recipients who have used up the maximum time limits for receiving welfare to better understand three core explanations for rural housing problems among the poor: community, individual, and family factors. We estimate models to weigh the relative effects of these factors on the likelihood of experiencing several housing outcomes, finding that rural location is the most consistent predictor of housing outcomes, predicting home ownership, and whether families reside in low-quality housing. We also find that individual and family factors affect the type of housing one has. We conclude that housing policies must be tailored to improve specific housing outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of dramatic levels of economic volatility and massive changes in welfare policies, scholars in this decade worried anew about whether our official poverty measure, adopted in the 1960s, is adequate. Poverty's causes continued to be debated, with demographic factors often pitted against policy and maternal employment changes. Some scholars focused on events that trigger spirals into poverty or poverty exits. The literature on consequences of poverty featured new techniques for identifying underlying processes and mechanisms. Researchers also explored “neighborhood effects” and focused on poverty deconcentration efforts. Finally, scholars produced a voluminous literature on the efforts to reform welfare and their subsequent effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this analysis, we explore how low-income African American fathers build understandings of successful manhood in the context of community-based responsible fatherhood programs. Drawing on life history interviews with 75 men in Illinois and Indiana, we explore men’s attempts to fulfill normative expectations of fatherhood while living in communities with limited resources. We examine the efforts of community-based fatherhood programs to shape alternative African American masculinities through facilitation of personal turning points and “breaks with the past,” use of social support and institutional interventions, and the reframing of provision as a priority of successful fatherhood. We refer to Connell’s hegemonic masculinity framework (Connell in Masculinities, Polity Press, Cambridge, ) and discuss how both men and programs borrow from hegemonic and street masculinities to develop alternative approaches to paternal involvement for marginalized men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's welfare model – targeted payments alongside low but progressive taxation – exemplifies the targeted approach, prioritizing the needs of poorer citizens within the constraints of low taxation. But does this approach match the welfare orientations of Australia's voters? Does the public hold other views about welfare, emerging out of competing interests in welfare debates? We consider results of two questions included in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005. The first question asks respondents about four welfare goals that outline competing welfare orientations: targeting poverty, expanding health and education, enforcing the welfare rules and reducing welfare. The second question asks about four taxation goals drawing on similar orientations as established for welfare: targeting tax cuts, taxing for welfare, enforcing tax rules and reducing overall tax. Asking about both enables us to tell whether voters approach tax and welfare ‘consistently’ and to see whether, in Australia's case, there is a preference for Australia's targeting model. We reach three conclusions: (1) voters hold diverse preferences about welfare and taxes, but the targeted model has a relatively strong voter base; (2) voters hold ‘pro-welfare’ orientations, choosing poverty reduction and expanding public services over both paternalism and cutting welfare, and (3) multivariate analysis indicates a level of consistency in welfare and tax orientations among voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors develop a theoretical model of foreign aid to analyze a method of disbursement of aid which induces the recipient government to follow a more pro-poor policy than it otherwise would do. In their two-period model, aid is given in the second period and the volume of it depends on the level of well-being of the target group in the first period. They find that this way of designing aid does increase the welfare of the poor. They also consider the situations where the donor and the recipient governments act simultaneously as well as sequentially, and they find that, by moving first in a sequential game, the donor country can, under certain conditions, increase the welfare of the poor and that of its own country compared to the case of simultaneous moves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare reformers sought to reduce “dependency,” or reliance on state-supported cash benefits and deployed a discourse of “self-sufficiency” to promote the legitimacy of efforts to remove welfare recipients from publicly funded cash assistance through either wage labor or marriage. We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare-reliant women to examine what self-sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self-sufficient. Grounded theory analysis revealed that for these women, self-sufficiency means formal independence from both the state (i.e., Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and men (i.e., marriage). Although they value marriage as an institution and would ideally marry, they do not consider marriage to be a likely route to self-sufficiency given the pool of men available to them. Rather, they embrace their own market-based wage labor as the means by which they can attain some measure of independence. Taking our lead from the women in this study, we challenge the emphasis on marriage in current welfare policy. We argue that employment training that results in better jobs for women and men and work supports that make low-wage work pay are clearly the appropriate direction for policy aimed at the welfare-reliant and working poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, there has been a spirited debate over the impact of the welfare expansion associated with the War on Poverty. Many analysts have maintained that public assistance expansion during this period decreased poverty by raising the incomes of the poor (an income enhancement effect), while others have contended that welfare expansion increased poverty by discouraging the poor from working (a work disincentive effect). There has been considerable empirical research about the historical effect of welfare on poverty, nearly all of which relies on the poverty rate (i.e., the percentage of persons with income less than the “poverty threshold”) as an indicator of the extent of poverty. However, this work has not employed designs that allow researchers to sort out distinct income enhancement and work disincentive effects. We develop a model of poverty rates in the American states that permits estimation of these distinct effects—based on state-level time-series data observed annually for the years 1960–90—and we find that welfare had both effects during our period of analysis. We also calculate the net impact of increases in welfare benefits on the poverty rate—taking into account both work disincentive and income enhancement effects. Our results indicate that this net impact is dependent on three variables: the initial level of cash benefits, wage levels for unskilled workers, and the share of the benefit increase provided through cash rather than in-kind assistance. Because of historical trends in these variables, since the 1970s welfare spending has become increasingly less effective in reducing the poverty rate. However, the significance of this result for policymakers must be tempered by evidence that flaws in the poverty rate as an indicator of poverty make it so that any finding about the net effect of an increase in welfare benefits on the poverty rate underestimates welfare's ability to lessen the true extent of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment-based pension plans constitute the main form of pension provision in Latin America. Although recent pension reform in the region has focused on strengthening these, old-age poverty remains high in most countries in the region, with older people over-represented among the poor. The article argues that ensuring old-age support for poor and vulnerable groups involves a different set of priorities and options for pension reform, namely a strong focus on tax-financed public cash transfer programmes. Cash transfer programmes focused on poor older people are the missing piece of pension reform in the region. The article examines the experience of the handful of countries with such programmes in place, and draws the lessons for the future of social policy in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. Although employment among welfare mothers increased substantially following the 1996 welfare reform, some former welfare recipients failed to find stable employment. We review the extent to which low-income mothers are without work and cash welfare for long periods of time and seek to understand the correlates of becoming chronically disconnected. Methods. We analyze data from a 1997–2003 panel study of single mothers who received cash welfare in an urban county in Michigan in February 1997. We develop a new measure of the extent to which former recipients are “chronically disconnected” from both employment and cash welfare and estimate regression models of the correlates of this economic outcome. Results. About 9 percent of respondents became chronically disconnected, defined as being without employment and cash welfare during at least one-quarter of the months during the 79-month study period. Important correlates of becoming chronically disconnected include having a physical limitation, having a learning disability, using illegal drugs or meeting the diagnostic screening criteria for alcohol dependence, and having no car or driver license. The chronically disconnected are more likely to have lost a job than to have lost welfare benefits and are more economically disadvantaged than those with regular sources of economic support. Conclusions. To reduce the number of women who fail to make a successful transition from welfare to work, more attention should be given to programs and policies that attempt to reconnect disconnected women to regular sources of economic support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year, the federal government spends a substantial sum on food assistance. As a result, there is a great deal of interest in assessing the role that food assistance programs play in helping low-income families maintain nutritional adequacy. This article aims to study one aspect of the relationship between food security and food assistance. For households that experienced some degree of hunger the course of a year, the authors examine whether food assistance use was associated with lower odds of food insecurity during the last thirty days of that year.

This article examines differences between rural and urban counties in the duration of welfare spells. We report evidence that suggests that parents from farming-dependent counties and rural counties are more likely to have shorter spells on welfare. The evidence appears consistent with the literature on rural low-income families in that there may be a concentration of low-wage jobs in rural counties. The difference between rural and urban areas is relevant to welfare policy as it pertains to caseload numbers, parents more likely to reach the sixty-month time limit, and parents more likely to trigger time-based policies, such as employment search. The study uses administrative data of Aid to Families With Dependent Children recipients from the state of Minnesota between 1986 and 1996. The methodology includes constructing descriptive statistics, calculating Kaplan-Meier estimates, and performing a Cox regression analysis with robustness checks across all three methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krumer-Nevo M. Listening to‘life knowledge’: a new research direction in poverty studiesInt J Soc Welfare 2005: 14: 99 –106© Blackwell Publishing, 2005.This article points to a current research direction in poverty studies, which explores the knowledge of people living in poverty. The article examines three studies from the USA, Europe and Israel which give voice to the‘life knowledge’ of people living in poverty regarding different aspects of their lives. Through these examples, the article examines the potential contribution of‘life knowledge’, possessed by people who are welfare-reliant, to the body of knowledge concerning welfare policy. Knowledge of this sort challenges standard preconceptions about the ways in which people cope with hardship and about the ways in which assistance might be given. The article discusses the ways in which‘life knowledge’ can be recognised as such and investigated, and how it might contribute to the formation of public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variations in aggregate poverty indices can be due to differences in average poverty intensity, to changes in the welfare distances between those poor of initially unequal welfare status and/or to emerging disparities in welfare among those poor of initially similar welfare status. This note uses a general cost-of-inequality approach that decomposes the total change in poverty into a sum of indices of each of these three components. This decomposition can serveinter aliato integrate horizontal and vertical equity criteria in the poverty alleviation assessment of social and economic programmes. The use of these measures is briefly illustrated using Tunisian data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global experience with pro-poor growth and empirical work spanning India, Malawi and Zimbabwe demonstrates the importance of agricultural growth for poverty reduction in poor rural areas, while also pointing to the need for complementary non-farm sector growth. Theoretical arguments, historical evidence and livelihoods modelling in poor medium-potential rural economies suggest that, contrary to thinking dominating much of current development policy, subsidies to relieve critical seasonal credit and cash restraints and reduce market and input supply uncertainties need to help in‘kick-starting’ agricultural markets if increased smallholder productivity in food-grains is to drive rural non-farm growth. Establishing the base conditions for these to work, designing and implementing them to be effective, and then phasing them out are major challenges facing policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During welfare reform, Congress passed legislation barring legal immigrants who entered the United States after August 1996 from Medicaid for five years after immigration. This legislation intended to bar only new immigrants (post-1996 immigrants) from Medicaid. However it may have also deterred the enrollment of legal immigrants who immigrated before 1996 (pre-1996 immigrants) and who should have remained Medicaid eligible. To compare the Medicaid enrollment of U.S.-born citizens to pre-1996 immigrants, before and after welfare reform, and to determine if variation in state Medicaid policies toward post-1996 immigrants modified the effects of welfare reform on pre-1996 immigrants. Secondary database analysis of cross-sectional data from 1994–2001 of the , Annual Demographic Survey of March Supplement of the Current Population Survey. Low-income, U.S.-born adults ( N=116,307) and low-income pre-1996 immigrants ( N=24,367) before and after welfare reform. Self-reported Medicaid enrollment. Before welfare reform, pre-1996 immigrants were less likely to enroll in Medicaid than the U.S.-born (OR=0.55; 95 percent CI, 0.51–0.59). After welfare reform, pre-1996 immigrants were even less likely to enroll in Medicaid. The proportion of immigrants in Medicaid dropped 3 percentage points after 1996; for the U.S.-born it dropped 1.6 percentage points ( p=0.012). Except for California, state variation in Medicaid policy toward post-1996 immigrants did modify the effect of welfare reform on pre-1996 immigrants. Federal laws limiting the Medicaid eligibility of specific subgroups of immigrants appear to have had unintended consequences on Medicaid enrollment in the larger, still eligible immigrant community. Inclusive state policies may overcome this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the unbundled impacts of a family cap policy and enhanced JOBS program on the fertility of 2100 women on welfare who were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups as part of New Jersey's welfare reform program. Data were collected quarterly from December 1992 through March 1997 on births, abortions, contraceptive pill use, and contraceptive sterilizations from welfare and Medicaid claim files. Results indicate that the family cap lowered births and increased abortions and contraception use but only for women who were short-time welfare users. Enhanced JOBS exerted an independent effect on fertility of more chronic recipients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, researchers use a set of random assignment studies of welfare and employment programs to investigate effects of varying child care policies on child care decisions of approximately 20,000 families. The aim is to inform the question, can child care policies best complement welfare and employment policies to help families work their way and stay out of poverty? The analysis proceeds in two stages, taking advantage of studies' experimental designs. Within each study, parents were randomly assigned to a program group, which was eligible for the new program services and subject to its requirements or to a control group, which was eligible for standard services and requirements. Child care assistance policies generally aim to encourage employment by reducing the cost of care through providing subsidies. Indeed, for many families, child care expenses can negate the financial benefits of employment. Single parent families at or below 200 percent of the poverty level pay an average of 19 percent of their earnings for nonparental care compared to the 6 percent spent by more advantaged families.

According to S. M. Lipset, the working classes are authoritarian in the cultural domain, but leftist in the economic domain as the interests of the underprivileged make them inclined to support redistributive politics. These findings have been repeated in an extensive body of research. In our analysis using Flemish (Belgian) data (N =1,577), we examine the economic orientations of the underprivileged, more specifically their attitudes towards social inequality, economic redistribution and welfare state politics. We found that many respondents (especially among the underprivileged) express complaints against social inequality, while at the same time rejecting the arrangements of the welfare state. We argue that it is inappropriate to consider this economic orientation as a specific ideological doctrine. Rather it should be considered as a syndrome that can be labelled ‘economic populism’. Economic populism is caused by feelings of social discontent, such as defeatism and political distrust. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This longitudinal study examined quantity and quality of maternal employment as predictors of depressive symptoms and parenting style in a sample of 94 low-income mothers whose 4-year-old children were enrolled in Head Start at baseline. Results suggest that answers to the question of whether work "pays" are complex: Findings suggest some benefits of greater employment participation while also indicating that women holding lower prestige jobs experienced increases in their use of negative parenting style, net of baseline demographic and psychological characteristics. Sparse evidence for selection processes was found, with cohabitation and maternal depressive symptoms modestly predictive of subsequent maternal employment. Implications of these findings for welfare reform and educationally related policies for low-income families are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis caused a clear deterioration in the welfare of the Indonesian people. In this paper, we examine the appropriate method to compare the change in poverty rates over time. We then piece together a consistent series of estimates of poverty rates during the crisis from various sources, covering a period from February 1996 to February 2002. The reconciliation of these various estimates paints a very reasonable picture and neatly tracks events. The poverty rate increased from the lowest point of approximately 15% at the onset of the crisis in the middle of 1997 to the highest point of approximately 33% nearing the end of 1998. This maximum increase in poverty rate during the crisis of 18 percentage points implies that approximately 36 million additional people were pushed into absolute poverty due to the crisis. After the peak point, the poverty rate started to decline again and reached the pre-crisis level of approximately 15% at the end of 1999, implying that the lost time in poverty reduction due to the crisis was approximately 2.5years. However, the poverty rate after this point appears to have fluctuated. During 2001 and early 2002, poverty was on the rise again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues in favor of the use of a social structural and a cultural approach to the study of poor families facing the consequences of historic policy change in the United States. Factors to consider in surveying poor people regarding welfare reforms; Influence of structural and social forces in poor people's responses to welfare policy proposals.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of research that has examined the content and prevalence of stereotypic media images of the poor. Research examining televised images and print media are reviewed. An analysis of media framing as well as classist, racist, and sexist imagery is provided. Additionally, to assess media depictions of the poor in the wake of welfare reform, 412 newspaper articles about poverty and welfare published during a 3-month period in 1999 were content analyzed. Although most articles were neutral in tone and portrayed the difficulties facing welfare recipients and the poor sympathetically, they did little to contextualize poverty or illuminate its causes. These findings are discussed in terms of their context and political function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses certain issues related to the 20/20 Initiative launched by five United Nations organizations which aims to ensure universal access to basic social services. The basic social services are basic education and primary health care, including reproductive health and population programmes, nutrition programmes and safe drinking water and sanitation as well as the institutional capacity for delivering those services. By giving priority to basic social services, the initiative is primarily targeted on the poor. The initiative is not only about the mobilization of additional public resources for basic social services, but is also about how equitably and efficiently they are put to use. Results from some 20 developing countries indicate that health and education spending are not particularly well targeted to the poor.

Poverty is now commonly recognised as a multi-dimensional concept, but there is less agreement about whether such recognition matters for poverty reduction policies in practice. This article argues that it does matter, as income is an input measure rather than a welfare outcome, the correlation between income and other aspects of poverty is imperfect and as there are strong complementarties between investment in human development and attaining sustained growth. Poverty measures should clearly be those that focus on the welfare of the poor, but it is often forgotten that many social indicators have a distributional component, just as does income per capita, so that increases do not necessarily correspond to improvements in the well-being of the poor. The record with respect to poverty reduction is uneven and certainly leaves no room for complacency. Although growth is rightly considered a part of any poverty reduction strategy, the agenda should focus more strongly on poverty reduction with growth (and so the distribution of the benefits of growth). Aid can play a role in this process, but only if the donor-based biases which distort aid from its poverty-reducing objective are confronted. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late eighteenth-century Mexico City, the state instituted unprecedented efforts to transform the mores of the poor. Enlightened elites and state bureaucrats energetically limned the vices of the lower classes as both a means of social self-definition and as a form of cultural proselytizing. This new antagonism between elite and popular culture cut not only across the social formation, but the topography of the city and the body of the individual, as the poor became bracketed with the now shameful functions of the lower body. The Bourbon reforms extended not only into daily life and Mexico City's increasingly monitored public places, but provided a focus for elite identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the effects of the political participation of lower class voters on government welfare policies in the United States. Role of political forces and institutions on the relationship between mobilization and government policy; Importance of lower-class mobilization for redistributive policy.

While the tendency for low-income groups to become economically marginalized may be a structural feature of the globalizing, post-Fordist economy, the degree to which they are allowed to become socially excluded is arguably a political issue. In many of the polities of the Western world, debate has focused not only on whether the State could or should intervene economically to ameliorate the causes of the “new poverty” but also on how the State should address the increasing rates of “social dislocation”—including youth crime, interpersonal violence, and drug misuse—which have been associated with its emergence. The postware welfare settlement produced a particular institutional nexus of welfare, justice, punishment and citizenship (Hay 1996; Garland 1985); yet the pressure of increasing social dislocation has also placed great strain on the institutions of the welfare state, particularly at the local level, notwithstanding the ideological commitment of differing governments to continue with the social welfare project. In this paper, we explore some circumstances in which the politics of the “local state” might mediate—in one way or another—the consequences of economic marginalization. In particular, we draw attention to the role which might be played by local state agencies—as intermediaries between the individual and the national State—in deploying policies which could offset the social exclusion of minorities and youth. By comparing the responses of local agencies to youth crime in two communities in Britain and France we highlight the “vertical” dimension of political relations which links marginalized communities with the wider resources of the State. And while many economies are experiencing similar social dislocations within disadvantaged communities, the vertical dimension may prove crucial in preserving the linkage between their residents and those of the wider, more privileged, society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early developments in the Australian system of provision for poor people led first to voluntary charitable assistance and then to a more generalized system of social security. A national scheme of old age pensions came in only in 1908; and social assistance schemes, as well as demogrants for defined statuses have gradually spread throughout the Australian Commonwealth. Specific provisions to meet crisis situations remain the responsibility of individual States. There are strong discretionary elements in the whole system. The arrangements for appeals against administrative decisions, and the reviews of these arrangements recently made, are then examined critically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at issues surrounding pauper disqualification under the New Poor Law of 1834. The 1832 Reform Act contained the first statutory disqualification for those receiving parish relief, hence, no person may be registered as a voter who received relief within the twelve months preceding July 15, 1979. Prior to removing disqualification in 1918, paupers did remain on the electoral lists and had voted in elections throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, the procedure for placing names on the electoral register is criticized.

This article examines the poor relief system in South East England from 1790 to 1834. If an economic explanation can be sustained, a key obstacle to understanding the Old Poor Law may be surmounted: the idea that the Speenhamland system was the major determinant of high relief costs would be thus relegated to history's boneyard of non-facts, and the probably unanswerable question of whether and when the country was going on or off such a system would be viewed as fundamentally irrelevant. Because relief under the Old Poor Law was administered and paid for in the parish, and because relief policy was shaped by local traditions and interests, there is no administrative impediment to explaining patterns of expenditure in terms of economic conditions. The Speenhamland system did not matter much at any time, either during or after the war. What mattered was the shape of the poverty problem, and that shape changed. During the war some rural parishes of southeastern England adopted bread scales when harvests failed, but there were many other remedies and scaled allowances did not become the determinant of policy. After the war family allowances were commonplace, and scales appear to have been as much in use as ever.

The last fifteen yeas have seen rapid changes in the financial circumstances of households with children. They are increasingly found among those on the lowest incomes and are over-represented among households dependent on income support for their survival. At the same time, changes in the social security system have left claimant families with greater financial responsibility and reduced access to additional sources of financial support from the state. The article reviews these changes in the economic welfare of households with children, paying particular attention to the circumstances of low-income families. It looks in turn at trends in household income, at changes in the social security system and at the patterns of debt and unmet needs reported by parents caring for children on low incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adrian Wood is right to note a significant shift in official thinking since the publication in 2000 of the DFID White Paper on globalization. This is confirmed by the 2004 White Paper on the same subject, published by the Department for Trade and Industry: there is more emphasis on the institutional pre-conditions for successful liberalization, more on the specificity of individual country experience, more on the plight of losers, and more on the need for social protection. These themes are important and require some re-thinking of aid policy. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]