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Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a means of addressing a range of issues relating to welfare systems, including by removing disincentives to economic, social and physical activity. However, UK disability organisations and figures have expressed concerns about whether UBI could lead to unintended consequences for people who currently receive support conditional on needs, means and/or behaviour. In this article, we outline prominent positions regarding disabled people in the literature on UBI and welfare reforms. We find that while there are reservations about the intentions and designs of UBI, there are means of securing positive outcomes and collaboration between its supporters and disability organisations. We also attempted a consultation but were unable to obtain a significant response. This was sometimes due to an expressed inability to respond meaningfully. This serves as a call for organisations to engage with UBI as a key issue of interest to disabled people. Points of Interest: Some disability organisations and leading figures have expressed concern about Universal Basic Income (UBI), a potential welfare system in which everyone receives a regular, secure and guaranteed payment. They feel that disabled people who currently receive support might lose out because they would not gain as much as others might or could even get less if existing spending is spread over the whole population. Some would prefer reforms that ensure disabled people receive a guaranteed minimum income that is still conditional on their income and needs. Some supporters of Universal Basic Income suggest that it is still possible to ensure that people with additional needs can receive more money alongside a guaranteed UBI payment. Most UK disability organisations appear not to have a clear (published) policy or position on Universal Basic Income. Disability organisations and leading figures in the movement must engage with Universal Basic Income as a policy that would impact disabled people's lives significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how means-tested childcare subsidies affect parental labor supply. Using the introduction of reduced childcare prices for low-income families in Norway in 2015, we show that these subsidies may have the unintended effect of discouraging work rather than promoting employment. First, structural labor supply simulations suggest that a negative parental labor supply effect dominates, ex ante. Ex post, we find a small and insignificant effect of means-tested childcare subsidies on parental labor supply in the reform year. We find no statistically significant bunching around the income limits in subsequent years, but we do find negative labor supply effects in subsequent expansions of the reform. Our results suggest that in a context where both parental employment and participation in formal childcare are high, means-tested childcare subsidies may have unintended parental labor supply effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I examined healthcare data and other potentially related variables across 25 countries in Europe and North America, which employ different levels of universal healthcare. The goal was to identify whether healthcare systems in these regions performed better, or more efficiently, when they are more universal in nature. The dependent variables identified are health outcomes and healthcare system efficiency, measured respectively by life expectancy at birth, and life expectancy at birth divided by healthcare spending per capita. Three models were designed to test various hypotheses. The first model strongly suggests that higher healthcare spending per capita is associated with better health outcomes within these countries. The second model found that more universal healthcare systems, in addition to greater healthcare spending, are even more predictive of better health outcomes. That is to say, more universal systems as well as increased spending per person on healthcare, are associated with higher life expectancies, even more so than increased spending alone. The final model could not show above a 95% confidence level, that universal healthcare systems are associated with greater efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of policy stalemate have crippled our capacity to sufficiently or equitably finance long-term services and supports (LTSS), leaving large numbers of low-income people at high risk of having unmet LTSS needs or going broke paying privately for LTSS. State and federal budgets also are buckling under increasing costs of their Medicaid programs. Modernizing LTSS financing has been a national priority for decades, but policy makers have failed to achieve significant reform. This article reviews past LTSS financing proposals, objections, and failures to draw lessons to spur policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global inequality is dropping, inequality within countries is rising. The problem of inequality is a cause for concern for nations as it undermines democracy and reduces welfare. Bhutan, a developing country in South Asia, also faces rising inequality. Based on the experience of the kidu system in Bhutan, this paper argues that the system is effective in reducing inequality of opportunity. The kidu functions as a welfare system in Bhutan, and is under the prerogative of the King of Bhutan. The traditional kidu system was reformed by the present monarch of Bhutan in 2006. It was improved with procedures, guidelines and entitlements in place to identify those most needing help. Through a dynamic and systematic organizational set up, it allowed for some form of means-tested social assistance to address inequality of opportunity in Bhutan. Particularly, the educational scholarships and the land reforms forms of kidu provides the poor and their future generations to escape from extreme poverty. The kidu system in Bhutan is a good example for other developing countries to institute an effective means-testing assistance and integrating a traditional system into the government mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private-heavy welfare systems, in which low or moderate state benefits are topped up by private welfare arrangements, are expected to undermine political support for the extension of social rights and perpetuate benefit fragmentation over time. And where low state benefits are means tested, political support is expected to be particularly prone to erosion. In this article I develop the argument that the combination of private pensions and means-testing does not always perpetuate fragmentation. Rather, it structures the policy preferences of pension industry representatives and right-of-centre parties such that these actors push for reforms to make the state pension more universal. I make my argument by examining the reform history of nine private-heavy pension systems in the three decades since 1980. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis maps the conditions under which universalizing reforms have occurred, and two case studies link institutional conditions to reform outcomes via the policy preferences of key political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: One of the pervasive problems with means‐tested public long‐term care programs is their inability to prevent individuals who could afford private long‐term services from taking advantage of public care. They often manage to elude the means‐test net through ‘strategic impoverishment’. We show in a simple model how this problem comes about, how it affects welfare and how it can be mitigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Means-testing is a reasonable posture, fully and completely in line with the underlying foundations of the historical development of the Social Security system - in fact, means-testing already exists to some degree in current tax law where a portion of social transfer payments are subjected to taxation based upon one's income level. This study proposes an expansion of current tax law surrounding means-testing of Social Security transfer payments and empirically assesses various income levels to determine the impact of such a proposed change on Social Security trust funds. The findings provide insight into the impacts of including means-testing as a part of the necessary revisions to ensure financial viability for this important social program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we reexamine the commonly invoked argument that due to the existence of a negative correlation between earning ability and family size, the latter can be used as a 'tagging' device, justifying subsidizing children (via provision of child allowances) to enhance egalitarian objectives. Employing a benchmark setting where the quality-quantity paradigm holds, we show that the case for subsidizing children is far from being a forgone conclusion. We demonstrate that the desirability of subsidizing children crucially hinges on whether benefits are means-tested or are offered on a universal basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past 20 years have witnessed a shift to work-based welfare conditionality within the advanced welfare states, as access to social benefits are increasingly predicated on individuals agreeing to behavioral conditions related to participation in the labor market. Existing literature on the political consequences of this shift offers contradictory expectations. While new paternalists claim that it should increase political participation among benefit recipients, others argue that it has a depressive effect. The majority of existing studies rely on cross-sectional analyses, which leaves them open to charges of selection bias. Utilizing multiple longitudinal research designs, this article finds that conditionality has a depressive effect on patterns of democratic engagement. Welfare conditionality reduces political and civic participation, political interest and efficacy, and personal efficacy. In disaggregating conditionality’s effects across two client groups, the article finds largely positive effects among recipients of the contributory disability benefit but negative effects among means-tested recipients of the lone parent benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In France, for the last 70 years, the universality of family policy -- in particular the flagship policy: family allowances -- has been an unquestionable principle. Family allowances were paid to all families with more than one child. Neither the right to receive the allowance, nor the amount of money granted, were subject to any other external conditions. Yet, since the late 1990s, due to public debate surrounding whether high-income families should receive such benefits, the universality principle has been questioned. Analysing both sides of this issue, this article examines the governmental reforms in 2014. According to the authors of this reform, the principle of universality was preserved, though a means-tested scheme was introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to quantify efficiency properties of flat and earnings-related pay-as-you-go financed social security systems of various institutional designs in order to identify an optimal pension design. Starting from a benchmark economy without social security, we introduce alternative pension systems and compare the costs arising from liquidity constraints as well as distortions of labor supply versus the benefits from insurance provision against income and lifespan uncertainty. Our findings suggest an optimal replacement rate of about 50 % of average earnings. In our model a single-tier earnings-related pension system yields the highest efficiency gains dominating flat benefits as well as two-tier systems of any form. We also show that the negative correlation between pension progressivity and pension generosity of real-world social security systems can be justified on efficiency grounds. Finally, our results indicate a positive impact of means-testing flat benefits against earnings-related benefits within multi-pillar pension systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiscal pressure and demographic change lead governments to seek ways of reducing state expenditure on pensions. Individuals are asked to take more responsibility, and funded, supplementary pension schemes have been established in many countries. This article looks at schemes that are voluntary - the NEST or Personal Accounts scheme in Britain and the Riester Pension scheme in Germany. It examines the debate about whether it is worthwhile for some people to participate in pension schemes that are not mandatory - particularly those with low incomes and/or potentially broken careers. The small pensions they accumulate in such schemes merely offset entitlements to means-tested pension benefits, leaving them no better off in old age. Concerns about the behavioural consequences of pension means-testing are not new. Nonetheless, few policymakers have been willing to look at when and how such concerns were expressed in the context of voluntary pension savings. Equally, they have seldom been prepared to explain the costs involved in guaranteeing savings-based pensions or the implications that the lack of offering such a guarantee might have for individual behaviour. The state has sought for people to take greater 'self-responsibility' for their retirement income, but many people wish for some certainty with respect to the pensions they can expect. These goals might well be in conflict. Whether the 'state pension for the 21st century', as proposed by the UK government, will succeed in satisfying the objectives both of the state and of pension savers remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we demonstrate that in addition to its acknowledged screening role, workfare-namely, introducing work (or training) requirements for welfare eligibility in means-tested programs-also serves to mitigate income misreporting by welfare claimants. It achieves this goal by effectively increasing the marginal cost of earning extra income in the shadow economy for claimants who satisfy the work requirement. We show that when misreporting is sufficiently prevalent, supplementing a means-tested transfer system with work requirements is socially desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare reforms of the Coalition government are marked by the legacy of Thatcherism. Social security reforms in the 1980s reshaped the system towards reliance on means-tested benefits. Negative policy feedback created by the opacity and perverse effects of means-testing has made these benefits an easy target for the Coalition, at least so far as working age people are concerned. Different policy feedbacks affect policy towards old age pensions. The government is locked into promoting private pensions, and is extending this commitment with automatic enrolment. To make private pensions pay, it has to reverse the slide to means-testing. The implication is that the pronounced bias against the working poor and in favour of older people in Coalition policy is not simply a matter of electoral preferences: rather, it reflects the political effects of previous policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes issue with the increasingly influential argument that the privatisation of pensions can be made to serve the public interest, defined in terms of collectivist values. Focusing on Chile, it shows how privatisation has been informed by the anti-collectivist values of neoliberal political economy. Compared with the previous publicly administered retirement system, Chile's distinctive combination of defined contribution individual accounts, and a means-tested retirement income safety-net, has generated a range of sub-optimal outcomes. The salience of path-dependency means that subsequent reforms have, in all essentials, preserved this anti-collectivist approach to retirement income protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We study optimal public health care rationing and private sector price responses. Consumers differ in their wealth and illness severity (defined as treatment cost). Due to a limited budget, some consumers must be rationed. Rationed consumers may purchase from a monopolistic private market. We consider two information regimes. In the first, the public supplier rations consumers according to their wealth information (means testing). In equilibrium, the public supplier must ration both rich and poor consumers. Rationing some poor consumers implements price reduction in the private market. In the second information regime, the public supplier rations consumers according to consumers’ wealth and cost information. In equilibrium, consumers are allocated the good if and only if their costs are below a threshold (cost effectiveness). Rationing based on cost results in higher equilibrium consumer surplus than rationing based on wealth. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

government would like to subsidize an indivisible good. Consumers’ valuations of the good vary according to their wealth and benefits from the good. A subsidy scheme may be based on consumers’ wealth or benefit information. We translate a wealth-based policy to a benefit-based policy, and vice versa, and give a necessary and sufficient condition for the pair of policies to implement the same assignment: consumers choose to purchase the good under the wealth-based policy if and only if they choose to do so under the translated benefit-based policy. General taxation allows equivalent policies to require the same budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the Australian family support schemes are income-tested transfers, targeted towards the lower end of the income distribution, whereas the Norwegian approach is to provide subsidized non-parental care services and universal family payments. We contrast these two types of policies and discuss policy changes within these policy types by presenting results from simulations, using microsimulation models developed for Australia and Norway. Labor supply effects and distributional effects are discussed for the hypothetical policy changes of replacing the means-tested family payments of Australia by the Norwegian universal child benefit schedule and vice versa, and of reducing the childcare fees in both countries. The analysis highlights that the case for policy changes is restricted by the economic environment and the role of family policy in the two countries. Whereas there is considerable potential for increased labor supply of Australian mothers, it may have detrimental distributional effects and is likely to be costly. In Norway, mothers already have high labor supply and any adverse distributional effects of further labor supply incentives occur in an economy with low initial income dispersion. However, expenditure on family support is already high and the question is whether this should be further extended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family Resources Survey (FRS) data for April 1997 to March 2000 are used to estimate the take-up of income support (IS) by a subset of pensioners. We scrutinize the quality of FRS data for this purpose and describe a process of identifying and correcting inconsistencies in the data. Comparisons are made, before and after corrections to the data, of take-up estimates, logistic regression take-up models and predictions of take-up responses to changes in IS rates. Overall, the corrections do not have large effects on estimated take-up rates but suggest that non-take-up is marginally less serious than the uncorrected data imply. Logistic regressions using corrected and uncorrected data were in broad agreement on the factors influencing take-up. There were some differences in the scale of these influences, with implications for predictions of take-up responses to changes in the generosity of IS. Desirable improvements in the FRS are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented. But the extent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This paper analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions in a comparative perspective. The main question is to what extent non-means-tested entitlements and means-tested benefits reduce relative economic poverty in different institutional settings. It is shown that the structure of non-means-tested benefits is more important than that of means-tested benefits in explaining differences in poverty alleviation across countries. The paper also presents a new method for estimating the anti-poverty effects of separate parts of the social transfer system. This method decomposes the anti-poverty effects of a set of social transfers into independent and combined effects, which produces more valid results than prevalent methods used to assess the impact of a particular transfer on poverty. The countries included in this study are Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The empirical analyses are based on data from the Social Citizenship Indicators Programme (SCIP) and Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) describing the situation in the mid-1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implications for lifetime income equality of alternative retirement income arrangements, using the Australian scheme as a benchmark. In Australia, the pay-as-you go financed age pension is means-tested and thereby provides a contrast with those countries where part or all of a basic pension is paid to all aged persons. Many governments are considering an increase in the level of means-testing. The results show that the introduction of a universal pension coupled with significant changes and simplifications to the structure of taxation and superannuation have little effect on the redistributive impact of the tax structure in a life cycle framework. The presence of means-testing appears to have no significant effect on life-time inequality. The results suggest that it is possible to eliminate complexities from the system providing retirement benefits without having any deleterious effect on equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]