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The exercise of freedom of movement within the European Union Member States also requires interventions in the national social security systems, the organization and exercise of which fall within the exclusive competence of the Member States. In order to fully exercise, in particular, the freedom of movement of persons, in particular persons engaged in gainful employment, it is necessary to lay down in the Union law procedures for resolving conflicts in the provision of family benefits. Collisions in the granting of family benefits generally arise when a person enjoying the free movement of persons moves to another Member State, while another family member (in particular the second parent or the dependent child) remains in the home Member State or moves to another Member State. In such situations, the Union legislation must provide the migrant with the same conditions for family benefits as a national of the Member State in which the migrant is present, so the Union legislation seeks to ensure an equal treatment of a person enjoying this freedom in the event of such a conflict with national social security systems. The subject of the paper is an analysis of the European Union coordination regulation determining the relevant social security system of an European Union Member State for the provision of family benefits so as not to disadvantage the migrant as a family member in acquiring and providing these benefits and, conversely, that this person does not get into unjustified social advantage in the provision of family benefits, i.e. that there is no unjustified overlapping of the provision of a family benefit for the same purpose to the same family member.

The need for qualitative research of deservingness perception is strongly emphasised in the literature. This article studies the perception of deservingness for a "Family 500 +"—cash benefit in Poland. For the first time, data from online forums was used in the studies of deservingness and welfare attitudes. It allowed to avoid numerous limitations associated with social surveys. The qualitative analysis showed how participants of Internet debates perceive the criteria of deservingness: control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, need, and what are the relations between the criteria. The impurity of all deservingness criteria was indicated and a new criterion "adequacy" was proposed. Moreover due to the fact that the study concerned a concrete, non-abstract family cash benefit addressed the relationship between the perceived deservingness of children and their parents was pointed out. The vast majority of posts on Internet forums referred to deservingness of parents, not children. This is particularly evident in relation to the criteria of control and reciprocity. Presenting the hypothesis of jealousy and scapegoat strategy, the article also shows the direction of future research on deservingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States is at a crossroads in its policies for families and women. Currently, the United States provides basic support for children, fathers, and mothers in the form of unpaid parental leave, child-related tax breaks, and limited public child care. In contrast, the other member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) empower families through paid parental leave and comprehensive investments in infants and children. The potential gains from strengthening these policies in the United States are enormous. Paid parental leave and subsidized child-care help to get and keep more women in the workforce, contribute to economic growth, offer cognitive and health benefits to children, and give parents options in defining their preferred work-life strategy. Indeed, the United States has been falling behind the rest of the OECD in many social and economic indicators by not adequately investing in children, fathers and mothers. Given the significant payoffs to these family supports, this article focuses on issues of reconciling work and care commitments for families with young children, and, in particular, on paid parental leave policies within the OECD and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines a conceptual and theoretical framework for improved comparative analysis of publicly provided social protection in developing countries, drawing on the research tradition of the study of longstanding welfare democracies. An important element of the proposed institutional approach is the establishment of comparable qualitative and quantitative indicators for social protection. The empirical example of child benefits indicates that differences between developed and developing countries should not be exaggerated, and that the prevalence of child benefits in sub-Saharan African and Latin American countries today resembles the inter-war period (1919-1938) situation in developed regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent trends in tax transfers have seen an increasing interdependence of tax and welfare systems in determining access to and the quantum of benefits, particularly in relation to in-work benefits, such as family support. Both the United Kingdom and Australia have adopted family support mechanisms that appear to operate in a similar way, but closer examination of the detail reflects the differences in underlying policy in the two jurisdictions. This article examines, first, the institutional and policy basis for the design of the family tax transfer system in each jurisdiction and, second, the issues raised by the interdependence of tax and social security concepts in the design of in-work benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Finland, the number and the proportion of women receiving minimum maternity or parental allowance increased dramatically in the 1990s. Their share increased to a high point of 30 percent in 1996 and remained at over 25 percent to the end of the decade. The aim of this study was to describe some of the characteristics typical of these women, and to analyse how often and in what circumstances they had to rely on last-resort income support (social assistance and housing allowance). The material comprises data on the total working-aged population, retrieved from the income security registers maintained by the Social Insurance Institution and from the social assistance register maintained by Stakes (National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health). Both cross sectional and longitudinal data were analysed by means of cross tabulations and means as well as logistic regression. We could differentiate two groups of mothers receiving minimum benefit: young mothers and middle-aged mothers with many children. Twenty percent of women on the minimum allowance also received social assistance and 38 percent received housing allowance. Reliance on social assistance was particularly common among mothers who had delivered their first baby and among young mothers who had delivered more than one baby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]