The U.S. Welfare State Is Minimal

Chapter 13 examines the size of the social safety net in the United States. Compared with European and other OECD countries, the United States has a fairly small safety net. The amount spent is approximately 2 percent of our GDP. In particular, programs aimed at protecting children from poverty are minimal. These programs have also been reduced over time, especially since the 1996 welfare reform changes. Challenging the myth of the bloated welfare state requires tackling multiple intersecting misperceptions, including erroneous portrayals of U.S. welfare expenditures as exorbitant and low-income programs as driving up the national debt. It will also require shattering myths that legitimize keeping welfare benefits low.

What’s Causing Secularization? Insecurity

Evolutionary modernization theory holds that both religiosity and pro-fertility norms are linked with existential insecurity, and a massive body of empirical evidence confirms this: secure people and secure countries show the lowest levels of religiosity. Existential security reflects not only a society’s per capita GDP but how evenly it is distributed, making income inequality a strong predictor of religiosity. Similarly, high levels of social welfare expenditures have a strong negative impact on religious attendance. Historic vulnerability to disease also has a persisting impact on religiosity: countries that were vulnerable to disease tend to be relatively poor and have low life expectancy and high infant mortality and high religiosity today. Overall, various indicators of existential security have a strong impact on religiosity, but this impact has a generational delay: the strongest predictor of religiosity around 2018 is the society’s level of infant mortality, not at the time of the survey but almost 40 years earlier, in 1980.

Efficient Expenditure Allocation for Sustainable Public Services?—Comparative Cases of Korea and OECD Countries

There have been contrasting trends in government expenditures spending among OECD countries. This study analyzed and compared the efficiency of government expenditures of OECD countries and Korea, focused on the health and welfare and social overhead capital (SOC) sectors, using data envelop analysis (DEA) and Tobit methods. Based on the indicator values of national ranking, Korea ranked 19th in the health and welfare sector and 10th in the SOC sector. However, compared to other countries in the OECD, Korea’s government expenditure has shown the highest efficiency in health and welfare (rank 1 with efficiency score of 2.401), while transportation SOC was at a level below the average (rank 13 with efficiency score of 0.813). In order to maintain a high level of efficiency in health and welfare expenditures, it is important for the Korean government to understand and improve conditions of the rates of poverty, unemployment, life expectancy, and low fertility. Moreover, in order to overcome the low level of efficiency in the SOC sector, the government needs to improve the quality of transport infrastructures along with implementation of an effective infrastructure-linking system between various modes of transportation, thereby enhancing its transport network density.

Healthcare and Welfare Policy Efficiency in 34 Developing Countries in Asia

The healthcare and welfare policies of nations, as well as the amount of investments put into these areas, vary across countries. Investments in healthcare and welfare have been increasing worldwide which brings the question of assessing the efficiency of these investments. There are, however, difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of such investments due to differences in countries’ economic development levels and due to the differences in data definition issues. There are only a limited number of studies in the literature that employ consistent and comparable indicators across countries. This study evaluates the healthcare investment efficiency and health competitiveness efficiency of 34 developing countries in Asia using a two-stage dynamic data envelopment analysis approach. Furthermore, we employ a broader measure of indicators on national healthcare and welfare policies and outcomes, in addition to the investment data on healthcare and welfare expenditures. Our findings indicate that the establishment of an investment environment with a consolidated approach and management is an important factor that increases the efficiency of investments in healthcare and welfare sectors. A consistent delivery of the national policy strategy is also crucial for reaching the medium-and long-term targets for each country. For example, if a country establishes healthcare and welfare policies that focus on improving its indicators with low efficiencies, the output will be improved and a better return on investment will be ensured in a long-term perspective.

Urban segregation and food consumption

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of China’s urban segregation caused by hukou restrictions on food consumption. Design/methodology/approach Based on the 2007–2009 Urban Household Survey data from six China provinces conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the authors adopt a propensity score matching (PSM) method to correct for potential selection bias. A Rosenbaum bounds test is applied to evaluate the sensitivity of the PSM results to unobserved variables. Findings The results show that holding rural hukou (RHs) reduces the consumption of livestock products and vegetables and fruit by 8.8 and 4.8 percent, respectively. The status of hukou does not affect the consumption of grain and edible oil. Hukou impacts on food consumption are heterogeneous across income levels, with low-income and middle-income households more vulnerable to urban segregation and hukou discriminations. A stronger motivation for precautionary saving and higher welfare expenditures that not compensated by social security lead to the lower food consumption by migrant households with RHs. Originality/value This paper advances the research frontier by investigating the impacts of hukou system on the structure of food consumption, which accurately reflects the household welfare.

Resisting Neoliberal Social Work Fragmentation: The Wall-to-Wall Alliance

Worldwide neoliberal policies are transforming the landscape of social work. Studies have shown that these policies increased social workers’ caseloads, regulated welfare expenditures, impaired public services’ capabilities to attend to the needs of growing demand, transformed social services delivery by implanting new public management methods, and often also worsened working conditions and deteriorated the professional status of social workers. Moreover, these policies have raised both poverty and inequality levels and left their negative marks on social work education, by prioritizing academic disciplines more attuned with the needs of neoliberal regimes. This article seeks to encourage schools of social work, social workers in the social services, and people living in poverty to challenge the harmful impact of this context by engaging in meaningful alliances focused on the fight against poverty and social exclusion. This article presents a long-term partnership project between a school of social work, local public social services, and groups of active clients, to tackle the issue of poverty in Israel. The article describes the project, introduces the theoretical and methodological principles, analyzes achievements and challenges, and finally discusses the potential contribution of such partnerships for the future of the profession.

Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel costs. Our estimates show that emigration substantially increased the local demand for political change, as measured by labor movement membership, strike participation, and voting. Emigration also led to de facto political change, increasing welfare expenditures as well as the likelihood of adopting more inclusive political institutions.