Rethinking the Welfare State offers a comprehensive and comparative analysis of social welfare policy in an international context, with a particular emphasis on the US and Canada. The authors investigate the claim that a decentralized delivery of government supported goods and services enables policy objectives to be achieved in a more innovative and efficient way, but at a lower cost. Secondly they examine the effectiveness of the voucher system as a solution to problematic welfare concerns. While this system has shown much promise in improving welfare, there have been problems for institutions unable to attract enough voucher-assisted consumers to ensure their survival. In this context, the authors examine major social programmes such as food stamps, primary and secondary education, post-secondary education, labour market training, childcare, healthcare, legal aid, low-income housing, long-term care and pensions.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Centralising the role of land and landowners, Spatial Flood Risk Management brings together knowledge from socio-economy, public policy, hydrology, geomorphology, and engineering to establish an interdisciplinary knowledge base on spatial approaches to managing flood risks.

In a period of rapid change for welfare states around the world, this insightful book offers a comparative study of three historically small welfare states: the US, Japan, and South Korea. Featuring contributions from international distinguished scholars, this book looks beyond the larger European welfare states to unpack the many common political and institutional characteristics that have constrained welfare state development in industrialized democracies.

This book provides an overview of the welfare rights movement, which occurred from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. The book highlights the movement's key events and figures, the movement's strengths and weaknesses, and how it intersected with other social and political movements of the time.

How social and intellectual changes undermine our justifications for the welfare state The welfare state has come under severe pressure internationally, partly for the well-known reasons of slowing economic growth and declining confidence in the public sector. According to the influential social theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, however, there is also a deeper and less familiar reason for the crisis of the welfare state. He shows here that a fundamental practical and philosophical justification for traditional welfare policies—that all citizens share equal risks—has been undermined by social and intellectual change. If we wish to achieve the goals of social solidarity and civic equality for which the welfare state was founded, Rosanvallon argues, we must radically rethink social programs. Rosanvallon begins by tracing the history of the welfare state and its founding premise that risks, especially the risks of illness and unemployment, are equally distributed and unpredictable. He shows that this idea has become untenable because of economic diversification and advances in statistical and risk analysis. It is truer than ever before—and far more susceptible to analysis—that some individuals will face much greater risks than others because of their jobs and lifestyle choices. Rosanvallon argues that social policies must be more narrowly targeted. And he draws on evidence from around the world, in particular France and the United States, to show that such programs as unemployment insurance and workfare could better reflect individual needs by, for example, making more explicit use of contracts between the providers and receivers of benefits. His arguments have broad implications for welfare programs everywhere and for our understanding of citizenship in modern democracies and economies.

The contributions to this volume offer an analysis of the pensions crisis: how it has come about, what it means and what measures can be taken to offset the effects of a massive shortfall between the available resources and public expectations.