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This chapter introduces the major themes of the volume by describing recent changes to safety-net policies in the United States. In early 2021, the United States implemented a revamped and greatly expanded federal Child Tax Credit that removed the requirement that parents have earnings in order to receive the payments. Severing this connection to work essentially reversed a key tenet of American welfare policy that had been in place since the enactment of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996. The chapter then discusses the divergent trend in many European counties that have pursued policies designed to discourage long-term recipiency and encourage work and other work-related behaviors (“activation”) and extended them beyond the US model. The chapter concludes by summarizing the chapters in the volume and identifying how these trends are manifest in different areas of countries’ social safety nets including unemployment insurance, disability benefits, social assistance, and public employment services.

The official poverty measure of the United States federal government is the most commonly used indicator of the material well-being of low-income Americans. In 1969, Mollie Orshansky’s simple formula was adopted by the federal government as the official metric by which to determine poverty status. The well-being of low-income Americans, of course, is the main reason why we are worried about poverty status. Single-parent families are a major cause of poverty and, according to many analysts, also a major consequence of poverty. In any event, even with Obamacare’s unprecedented subsidies, health care costs will continue to rise unless effective counter-measures are adopted, worsening the employment and earnings prospects of most Americans, especially low-income workers. An aging population means higher taxes on young workers to pay for the elderly’s underfunded public and private retirement systems, including Medicare and Medicaid, that threaten sharply higher taxes on all American workers.

Since its creation, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has changed from an antihunger program to an income-supplementation program. Because the program (and its predecessor Food Stamp Program) was not designed for this purpose, the result is a program that has many unintended and, many believe, negative effects. The key challenge is to modernize a massive income support program that started as a small food assistance program. The author proposes an effort to rationalize the current patchwork of programs that make up the U.S. safety net—in a way that balances what looks to be long-term weak demand for labor with the need to minimize the work and marriage disincentives in current law.

(2013). Teaching in Today’s Global Classroom: Policy Analysis in Cross-National Settings. Journal of Public Affairs Education: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 381-387.

Asia’s expanding economic and geopolitical importance has generated worldwide interest in its social protection and social welfare programs. How are the diverse countries that comprise Asia addressing the persistent 21st century challenges of aging, disability, changing family structures, rising health care costs, education for emerging industries, and poverty among both working people and those without jobs? What lessons can be learned from recent policy developments, and how can they be applied to improve social outcomes in the future? More than 100 scholars and practitioners from 18 countries met in Singapore in 2009 to explore these questions under the auspices of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. The conference, titled “Asian Social Protection in Comparative Perspective,” featured both single-country and multicountry comparison studies addressing issues of aging and pensions, disability, long-term care, assets and entrepreneurship, health care, poverty, family formation, labor markets, outsourcing of services, education, public assistance, social insurance, and the political economy of welfare regimes. All of the conference papers can be found at http://umdcipe.org/conferences/policy_exchanges/conf_papers/index.shtml. One of the most striking streams of research at the conference focused on social policies undertaken by the People’s Republic of China in the 1990s and 2000s to manage its epic-scale economic and demographic transitions. Taken together, these papers paint a fascinating portrait of pragmatic, incremental, trial-and-error policymaking in response to dislocations caused by the opening of China’s economy to market forces, the massive migration of workers and their families from rural to urban areas, and the already rapid aging of the Chinese population. An edited volume of selected papers, Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition, is available from Oxford University Press (Besharov & Baehler, 2013). China’s embrace of market mechanisms in the late 1970s inexorably disrupted the social welfare arrangements of the communist period, many of which had depended heavily on guarantees of lifetime employment and access to social services provided by state-owned enterprises. As state-owned enterprises were downsized and privatized, the old workplace-based system of social protection withered. In the early days of the market reforms, downsized enterprises were expected to provide their laid-off workers with basic living allowances, but this practice became financially unsustainable as the number of layoffs grew rapidly. From the mid-1980s to the mid1990s, the burden of financing not only unemployment benefits, but also education, health care, pensions, child care, maternity and sick leave, industrial injury, and other public benefits was transferred in fits and starts from workplaces to various combinations of individual, employer, and state contributions at local, provincial, and national levels. At the same time, benefit generosity predictably diminished as policymakers focused greater resources and attention on economic development than social protection.

Worldwide, more than 215 million people have left the countries of their birth and moved elsewhere (World Bank, 2011). These migrants make up more than 3 percent of the world’s population. Another 700 million adults say they would migrate to another country if they could, according to polls conducted by Gallup (Esipova & Ray, 2009). Almost all of the world’s nations are either sending or receiving countries, or both. As of 2010, the world’s top three migrant sending countries were Mexico (about 12 million), India (about 11 million), and Russia (about 11 million). The top regional destinations were North America, Europe, and the Gulf States, which together contained about 44 percent of the world’s migrant population. The United States, alone, had more than 42 million migrants, making it the world’s top receiving country. As a region, though, Europe (depending on how defined), had about as many migrants. Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, together, had about 38 million migrants in 2010. The Gulf States of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, combined, had more than 15 million migrants (World Bank, 2011). Public attitudes toward migration differ among receiving countries. In 2011, for example, a majority of adults in Spain, the UK, and the U.S. told the German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) Transatlantic Trends Survey (2011) that “immigration is more of a problem” than “an opportunity” (p. 5). In other countries, such as Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, opinion was split: just about as many adults said “immigration is a problem” as said “immigration is an opportunity” (p. 5). Only among Canadian adults (surveyed through 2010) did a majority see immigration as more of an opportunity (German Marshall Fund, 2010, p. 4). These differences are likely the result of the receiving country’s social values and economic situation, as well as the history and characteristics of migration in that country. Views in sending countries are also mixed. In a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, half of Mexican adults (50 percent) said “people leaving [Mexico] for jobs in other countries” was “a very big problem” for Mexico (Pew Global Attitudes, 2012, p. 15). The same survey, however, found other issues more likely to be rated as “very big problems” (p. 16) for Mexico: cartel-related violence (according to 75 percent of Mexican adults), human rights violations by the military and police (74 percent), crime (73 percent), corrupt political leaders (69 percent), economic problems (68 percent), illegal drugs (68 percent), terrorism (62 percent), and pollution (58 percent). In 2010, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, and the University of Maryland School of Public Policy held an international conference on migration in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Titled: Migration: A World in Motion: A Multinational Conference on Migration and Migration Policy, the conference brought together a worldwide audience of academics and professionals from think tanks, government agencies, the private sector, and civil society.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, many member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) experienced extended periods of high and persistent unemployment, often coupled by low or declining rates of labor force participation and increasing numbers of recipients of government benefits (essentially unemployment, disability, and social assistance). In response, a number of countries over the past two decades have introduced policy reforms aimed at activating those recipients apparently able to work: requiring them to actively seek employment or engage in other specified workor job training-related activities. In the 1990s, the United States took the lead in activating those on social assistance (cash welfare) with its welfare-to-work programs. In recent years, other OECD countries made similar reforms to their social assistance programs, but they have also made more fundamental reforms to their unemployment and disability programs. To explore these developments, the University of Maryland Center for International Policy Exchanges (CIPE) and the OECD held an international conference in Paris, France in November 2011 on “Labour Activation in a Time of High Unemployment.” The conference consisted of five sessions: the political economy of labor activation reform; activation of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit recipients; outsourcing of labor activation services; activation of social assistance benefit recipients; and activation of disability benefit recipients. Each session included presentations of policy papers written by European researchers, further elaborations by European government officials, and discussion papers from prominent U.S. researchers that synthesized the policy lessons for the United States. In total, approximately 90 people attended from 19 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All of the conference papers and presentations can be found at http://umdcipe.org/conferences/LaborActivationParis/conference_papers.html. This report summarizes some of the major points made in the presentations and follow-up discussions.

This article analyses the socioeconomic context within which a range of active labour market policies (ALMPs) were initiated in many countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the extent to which these measures had an impact on unemployment over the last several decades prior to the contraction of economic growth in 2008. Examining how the downturn of the economy has altered this context, the analysis goes on to scrutinise the choices that confront policy makers and the implications of alternative approaches to ALMPs in times of high unemployment.

In the 1960s, various social programs were started (like Head Start) or dramatically expanded (like AFDC). Loosely, this period of expansion is called the Great Society. Too many Great Society social programs, unfortunately, have been disappointments—at least when compared to the high hopes of the '60s. Even if they “work,” most of us wish that they worked much better. Some people take such statements to mean that the Great Society's social programs should be defunded. Most Great Society programs, however, are surely here to stay, for they serve important social functions. How many of us really think there could be an America without a social safety net? It is now time to do the difficult and unglamorous work of systematic program improvement. Instead of testing program efficacy over and over again, we should engage in ongoing and evidence-based efforts to increase program effectiveness (in both large and small ways). © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Even in the current economic situation, in developed countries, rhetoric about cutting “poverty” is misleadingly outmoded—because it implicitly suggests that government income transfers can be the vehicle for achieving substantial reductions in poverty. Almost all Americans already live far above subsistence poverty: most because of their earnings, and the rest because of government transfer programs. This decline in material poverty is obscured by weaknesses in how the official U.S. poverty measure counts income. What is now called poverty is really “income inequality.” Reducing income inequality is also a vitally important social goal, but it cannot be accomplished through income transfers alone. The authors argue that, although income transfers have a role to play in lessening the impact of material deprivation, real progress in raising incomes will require building the human capital of the economically disadvantaged. This means both increasing the earnings capacity of lower-income workers and reducing the number of female-headed families.

International migration has reached new heights since the 1960s. Altogether, some 215 million people live in countries other than their countries of birth, and according to surveys, another 700 million say they would leave their homes and move to another country if they could. Nations-both sending and receiving-have responded to this growing international migrant flow with new laws and domestic programs. In receiving countries, they include laws and programs to control entry, encourage high-skilled immigration, develop refugee policy, and speed assimilation. In sending countries, governments are implementing and experimenting with new policies that link migrant diasporas back to their home countries culturally or economically-or both. This volume contains a series of thoughtful analyses of some of the most critical issues raised in both receiving and sending countries, including US immigration policy, European high skilled labor programs, the experiences of migrants to the Gulf States, the impact of immigration on student educational achievement, and how post-conflict nations connect with their diasporas. We hope that the volume helps readers draw lessons for their own countries, and, hence, is offered in the spirit of mutual learning within a continued international dialogue of research and analysis on migration. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Ellen L. Berg Department of History University of Maryland College Park, Maryland, United States Douglas J. Besharov School of Public Policy University of Maryland College Park, Maryland, United States Ozge Bilgili Maastricht Graduate School of Governance and UNU-Merit Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Mary E. Breeding Independent Evaluation Group World Bank Washington, DC, United States Dylan Conger Trachtenberg School of Public Policy & Public Administration George Washington University Washington, DC, United States Gerard-Rene de Groot Faculty of Law Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Manon de Heus Independent writer and journalist Berlin, Germany Jaap Dronkers School of Business and Economics Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Katharina Eisele Faculty of Law Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Ahmed Mustafa Elhussein Mansour Department of Political Science United Arab Emirates University Al Ain, United Arab Emirates Neli Esipova Gallup Princeton, New Jersey, United States Sonja Fransen Maastricht Graduate School of Governance Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Metka Hercog Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology University of Basel Basel, Switzerland Rebecca Hinze-Pifer Harris School of Public Policy University of Chicago Chicago, Illinois, United States Binod Khadria School of Social Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India Katie Kuschminder Maastricht Graduate School of Governance Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Mark H. Lopez Pew Research Center Washington, DC, United States Eileen Patten Pew Research Center Washington, DC, United States Julie Ray Gallup Omaha, Nebraska, United States Andrew Selee Wilson Center Washington, DC, United States Melissa Siegel Maastricht Graduate School of Governance Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Rajesh Srinivasan Gallup Princeton, New Jersey, United States Roberto Suro Price School of Public Policy University of Southern California Los Angeles, California, United States Maarten Peter Vink Department of Political Science Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Silja Weyel Maastricht Graduate School of Governance Maastricht University Maastricht, the Netherlands Anja Wiesbrock Research Council of Norway Lysaker, Norway

According to the Head Start Act (1998), children are income-eligible for the program if their “families' incomes are below the poverty line.” There are a number of statutory exceptions to this general rule and, according to the Head Start Bureau, the result is that about 6 percent of the children in the program are not poor. But the major national surveys of Head Start families report that 30 percent or more of Head Start children are not “poor.” This paper confirms and explains the high proportion of nonpoor children in Head Start: at enrollment, at least 28 percent are not poor; at midyear, at least 32 percent are not poor; and by the end of the program year, at least 34 percent and perhaps more than 50 percent are not poor. Although the presence of some of these nonpoor children seems to be an appropriate or at least understandable aspect of running a national program with Head Start's current organizational structure, the presence of others seems much less warranted and raises substantial questions of horizontal equity. Moreover, taken together, the large number of nonpoor children suggests that the program is not well targeted to fulfill its mission of providing compensatory services to developmentally disadvantaged children—and reveals the essential ambiguity of Head Start's role in the wider world of early care and education. The income and program dynamics that have led to so many nonpoor children being in Head Start are also at work in many other programs, and, thus, our findings demonstrate the need to understand better how income eligibility is determined across various means-tested programs.

Between March 1994 and July 2001, welfare rolls fell an amazing 59 percent from their historic high of 5.1 million families. How much of this decline was the result of welfare reform and how much was the result of other factors, such as the strong economy? What were the effects of the decline on low-income families? About a quarter billion dollars is being spent on studies and surveys designed to answer these and other questions. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to get more than a modest amount of the information sought.

The defense attorney must remember that the Juvenile Court is a court and not a social agency. But the fact that it is a court should not obscure the fact that it is a court with social objectives and social techniques. Thus, he must have the knowledge and ability to suggest alternative treatments to court adjudication.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article examines the characteristics (and later life histories) of 16- to 23-year-olds who, during the 1980s, were “disconnected” from mainstream society, that is, they were not enrolled in school, not gainfully employed, not in the military, and not married to someone who was “connected” in one of these ways. One in three youths were disconnected for at least half of a calendar year. As adults, youths who were disconnected for a short time (in only one or two years) did not differ substantially from those who were never disconnected in terms of educational attainment, work history, family income, reliance on government programs, and marital status. However, those who were disconnected in three or more years experienced significantly greater hardships. This article suggests that school-related interventions (such as career-oriented education, after-school “safe havens,” and targeting individual deficits) might help prevent youthful disconnectedness.

As a society, we continue to broaden the jurisdiction of child abuse programs so that an ever larger proportion of poor children (and their families) are drawn into the child protective system. Helping these families does not require mandatory reporting laws, involuntary investigations, central registers of reports, and psychologically oriented “treatment” interventions

This article examines trends in teen sexual behavior. Data were derived from 5 principal sources, which include: 1) the National Survey of Family Growth; 2) National Survey of Adolescent Males; 3) National Survey of Young Men; 4) Youth Risk Behavior Survey; and 5) National Survey for Men. There really was a sexual revolution, as the foregoing data indicate. An increase in sexual activity was observed among young teens, aged 15 years and below, as well as middle-class and white teenagers. The use of contraceptives also increases probably due to the fear of AIDS and the increasing proportion of teenagers who are having sex. Because more teenagers were using contraceptives, the pregnancy rate per 1000 sexually active teenagers actually declined during the 1980s, even when more teenagers were having sex. Nonetheless, failures of contraceptive usage have led to high levels of abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and nonmarital births. Society should confront these two concerns. First, for younger teenagers, too early of a sexual experience can be emotionally distressing and inconsistent with healthy development. Second, for disadvantaged teens of all ages, sex always leads to an out-of-wedlock birth and long term welfare dependence. The challenge for school-based programs is to pursue the following goals: 1) lower the level of sexual activity and 2) raise the rate of contraceptive use among sexually active teens.

Chapter 1. Introduction: Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition Karen Baehler and Douglas J. Besharov Chapter 2. Welfare Regimes in the Wake of State Socialism: China and Vietnam Jonathan London Chapter 3. Social Benefits and Income Inequality in Post-Socialist China and Vietnam Qin Gao, Martin Evans, and Irwin Garfinkel Chapter 4. Social Security Policy in the Context of Evolving Employment Policy Barry Friedman Chapter 5. Urban Social Insurance Provision: Regional and Workplace Variations Juan Chen and Mary Gallagher Chapter 6. Health and Rural Cooperative Medical Insurance Song Gao and Xiangyi Meng Chapter 7. The Quest for Welfare Spending Equalization: A Fiscal Federalism Perspective Xin Zhang Chapter 8. Financing Migrant Child Education Jing Guo Chapter 9. Labor Migration, Citizenship, and Social Welfare in China and India Josephine Smart, Reeta Tremblay, and Mostaem Billah Chapter 10. Ethnic Minorities and Trilingual Education Policies Bob Adamson, Feng Anwei, Liu Quanguo, and Li Qian, Chapter 11. Danwei, Family Ties, and Residential Mobility of Urban Elderly in Beijing Zhilin Liu and Yanwei Chai Chapter 12. Marriage, Parenthood, and Labor Outcomes for Women and Men Yuping Zhang and Emily Hannum Chapter 13. Implications of the College Expansion Policy for Social Stratification Wei-Jun Jean Yeung Chapter 14. The Evolving Response to HIV/AIDS Zunyou Wu, Sheena G. Sullivan, Yu Wang, Mary Jane Rotheram,and Roger Detels Index

1. Introduction Douglas J. Besharov and Kenneth A. Couch Part I. European Measures of Income, Poverty, and Inequality 2. The OECD Approach to Measuring Income Distribution and Poverty Michael F. Forster and Marco Mira d'Ercole 3. Income Indicators for the EU's Social Inclusion Strategy Isabelle Maquet and David Stanton 4. Deconstructing European Poverty Measures Richard V. Burkhauser Part II. Broadening Measures of Income and Other Financial Resources 5. Accounting for the Distributional Effects of Non-cash Public Benefits Holly Sutherland and Panos Tsakloglou 6. Accounting for Imputed and Capital Income Flows Joachim R. Frick and Markus M. Grabka 7. Accounting for Employee Benefits Neil Gilbert 8. Impressionistic Realism: A European Focus on U.S. Poverty Measurement David S. Johnson Part III. Income Levels for Social Assistance and their Behavioral Effects 9. Minimum-Income Benefits in OECD Countries Herwig Immervoll 10. Social Assistance Schemes in Developing Countries Margaret Grosh, Carlo del Ninno, and Emil Tesliuc 11. Europe's Other Poverty Measures: Absolute Thresholds Underlying Social Assistance Richard Bavier Part IV. Non-Income Monetary Measures 12. Asset-Based Measurement of Poverty Andrea Brandolini, Silvia Magri, and Timothy M. Smeeding 13. Consumption-Based Measures in Developing Nations: Lessons from Brazil Peter Lanjouw 14. Alternatives to Income-Based Measures of Poverty Kenneth A. Couch Part V. Multi-Dimensional Measures 15. Developing and Learning from EU Measures of Social Inclusion Eric Marlier, Bea Cantillon, Brian Nolan, Karel Van den Bosch, and Tim Van Rie 16. Using Non-Monetary Deprivation Indicators to Analyze European Poverty and Social Exclusion Brian Nolan and Christopher T. Whelan 17. Poverty Redefined as Low Consumption and Low Wealth, Not Just Low Income: Psychological Consequences in Australia and Germany Bruce Headey, Peter Krause, and Gert G. Wagner 18. Anomalies in European Measures of Poverty and Social Exclusion Neil Gilbert Part VI. Conclusion 19. New Comparative Measures of Income, Material Deprivation, and Well-Being Timothy M. Smeeding

Child welfare agencies have moved to a decidedly short-term orientation toward service delivery. The problems faced by many families, however, require a more long-term approach, with services designed to address problems with roots in a host of social, economic, and familial troubles—often going back many generations. This paper describes the conceptual framework for an on-going and non-categorical approach to services, based on a home visitor model. Obstacles as well as advantages are discussed.

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) was passed in 1998 with the purpose of consolidating, coordinating, and improving the effectiveness of the nation’s publicly funded employment and training programs. Whether or to what degree this has occurred has been a subject of interest for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers ever since, and the Act is drawing even more attention of late as Congress considers its reauthorization. In The Workforce Investment Act: Implementation Experiences and Evaluation Findings, a new book from the W.E. Upjohn Institute, editors Douglas J. Besharov and Phoebe H. Cottingham present a group papers that provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date look yet at WIA’s program performance and impact. The papers were commissioned for a meeting held with staff of the European Commission for a discussion of WIA lessons and the implications for future workforce programming in the United States as well as Europe. They are organized into five areas: 1) understanding WIA, 2) program implementation, 3) performance management, 4) impact evaluations, and 5) future evaluation choices. In addition, they detail -over