I contribute to the literature on the growth of public spending in Western economies with a novel mechanism that ties it to the marketization process, i.e. the substitution of home with market production. I argue that a key contributor to the expansion of social spending is the replacement of family-based transfers with public pensions and other public transfer programs. I provide empirical support for this hypothesis by establishing the long-run relationship between government size and marketization, alongside other established determinants of government spending, in a panel of Western economies. I then illustrate a potential mechanism behind the results with a theoretical model in which, as a result of the productivity advantage of the market over the home sector, family-based intergenerational transfers decline unexpectedly, providing a rationale for government intervention in the form of public pensions with a poverty relief component.

This article uses Loïc Wacquant’s concept of the centaur state to analyse symbolic framings of the meaning and future of work in the Australian policy response to COVID-19 in 2020. In contrast with historical conceptualisations anchored in rights and social security, contemporary Australian social welfare policy discourse is dominated by political representations of the imperative to work. For people currently outside of the labour market, self-reliance through paid work is a primary objective of social security policy. In 2020, economic impacts of national lockdowns were ameliorated by large transfers from the state to businesses and individuals. Concurrent announcements of plans for a ‘business-led’ post-pandemic economic recovery centred the message that the meaning of work lies in its individual and social utility. Prior to the pandemic, transformation of the modes of organisation of work had already brought into question normative claims about the meaning of work, and what is comprehended by the term ‘job’. Analysis of key ‘economic recovery’ policy initiatives illustrates that they combined considerable corporate welfare with a construction of job seekers as having unrealistic expectations of meaningful work, for which there could be no room in the institutional machinery driving economic recovery. In the policy trajectory of the Australian centaur state, the future of work for people currently unemployed is to serve as a resource to fuel the business-led recovery.

Australian social policy has seen apparently contradictory developments over the period of economic restructuring. Social spending has increased based on a highly redistributive model while inequality has grown. This article explores the relationship between Australia’s experience of economic restructuring and the political dynamics of an emerging ‘dual welfare state’. Importantly, the article argues that Australian reformers did not reject the state per se, nor egalitarianism as an objective. Instead, reform sought to combine greater competition with compensation, generating larger inequalities in market incomes alongside growing social spending. The article explores how Labor combined neoclassical ideas about competition with a commitment to a ‘small state’ version of social democracy. This did moderate inequalities through the period of restructuring, but it also altered the dynamics of political contestation. The article provides two typologies to understand this political dynamic, arguing forms of marketisation opened the door to a political contest over the nature, rather than the extent, of public provision, while the model of targeting reinforced paternalist tendencies inherent in neoliberal reform.

This article conducts a benefit-cost analysis of a child allowance. Through a systematic literature review of the highest quality evidence on the causal effects of cash and near-cash transfers, this article produces core estimates on the benefits and costs per child and per adult of increasing household income by $1000, which can be used for any cash or near-cash program that increases household income. We then apply these estimates to three child allowance proposals, with the main proposal converting the $2000 Child Tax Credit in the federal income tax code into a fully refundable and more generous child allowance of $3600 per child ages 0–5 and $3000 per child ages 6–17, as enacted for 1 year in the American Rescue Plan. Aggregate costs and benefits are estimated via micro-simulation. Our estimates indicate that making the $2000 Child Tax Credit fully refundable and increasing benefits to $3000/$3600 would cost $97 billion per year and generate social benefits of $929 billion per year. Sensitivity analyses indicate that the results are robust to alternative assumptions and that each of the three child allowance proposals produces a very strong to an extraordinarily strong return for the U.S. population.

This article investigates into how gender-neutral social policies affect gender dynamics of labour market participation, family life and livelihood. Taylor-Gooby’s [“New risks and social change”, pp. 1–28, 2004] new social risks concept and Holmes and Jones’ [Rethinking Social Protection from a Gender Lens. ODI Briefing Paper, 2010] framework are used to probe into the deepening of existing gender inequalities in the Mauritian multicultural society. The article argues that the prevailing social interventions in Mauritius overlook new social risks that have stemmed from the island’s economic transformation from a monocrop to an innovation based economy. This structural change has caused women, in particular, to face new risks and vulnerabilities. To advance the argument, the article examines gender norms, lack of appropriate gender-sensitive labour market policies and gender-neutral social protection measures. A mixed methodology is used with both secondary and primary data collected via interviews with key stakeholders from public and non-governmental organisations. The findings reveal the need to connect gender-sensitive welfare policies to risks and vulnerabilities to promote greater gender inclusiveness.

Raising employment has been at the heart of EU strategies for over twenty years. Social investment, by now a widely debated topic in the comparative welfare state literature, has been suggested as a way to pursue this. However, there are only a couple of systematic comparative analyses that focus on the employment outcomes associated with social investment. Analyses of the interdependence of these policies with regard to their outcomes are even more scarce. We empirically analyse the extent to which variation in employment rates within 26 OECD countries over the period 1990-2010 can be explained by effort on five social investment policies. We additionally explore the role of policy and institutional complementarities. Using time-series cross-section analyses we find robust evidence for a positive association between effort on ALMPs and employment rates. For other policies we obtain mixed results. ALMPs are the only policies for which we observe signs of policy interdependence, which point at diminishing marginal returns. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates that the interdependence of social investment policies varies across welfare state regimes. Together, this indicates that the employment outcomes of social investment policies are also contingent on the broader framework of welfare state policies and institutions.

We examine the connection between taxes paid and benefits accrued under the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program on both the intensive and extensive margins. We perform these calculations for stylized workers given the existing benefit structure and disability hazard rates. On the intensive margin, we examine the effect of an additional dollar of earnings on the marginal payroll taxes contributed and future benefits earned. We find that the present discounted value of disability benefits received from an additional dollar of earnings, net of the SSDI payroll tax, generally declines with age, becoming negative around age 40 and reaching almost zero at age 63. On the extensive margin, we determine the effect of working an additional year on the additional payroll taxes and future benefits as a percentage of income. The return to working an additional year at an income level just large enough to earn Social Security credits for the year is large and positive through age 60. However, the return to working an additional full year is substantially smaller and becomes negative at approximately age 57. Thus, older workers face strong incentives to earn enough to obtain creditable coverage through age 60, but they face disincentives for additional earnings. In addition, workers aged 61 and older face work disincentives at any level of earnings. We repeat this analysis for stylized workers at different levels of earnings and find that, while the program transfers resources from high earners to low earners, the workers experience similar patterns in the returns to working.

Over the past century and a half, Spain has had a tumultuous political history. What impact has this had on social policy? Democracy has had a positive effect on both the levels of social spending and its long-term growth trend. With the arrival of democracy in 1931, the transition began from a traditional regime (with low levels of social spending) to a modern regime (with high levels of social spending). Franco’s dictatorship, however, reversed this change in direction, retarding the positive growth in social spending. At the same time, the effect of left-wing parties was statistically significant only in the 1930s (prior to the Keynesian consensus) and in the period of the Bourbon Restoration (when the preferences of low-income groups were systematically ignored).

In this paper we explain some of the difficulties of providing forecasts of the financial benefits of early intervention programmes, focussing on those delivered during the early childhood period. We highlight the diversity of early intervention, and the complexity and multiplicity of outcomes. We summarise recent work at the Early Intervention Foundation to assess the evidence on the impacts of early intervention, recognising the diversity of approaches to delivery and the importance of innovation and local practice as well as of rigorous approaches to evaluating causal effects. We also describe new ways of assessing accurately the local fiscal costs of late intervention and consider the implications of this for addressing the well-established barriers to investment in prevention. Our analysis brings to the fore gaps in the evidence from which even the most rigorous ‘gold-standard’ research is not immune. These limitations prevent the production of an accurate and realistic cost-benefit ratio or net present value for the majority of programmes as delivered in practice. We suggest some paths towards a firmer foundation of evidence and a better alignment of evidence and policy.

The paper shows the impact of changes in multi-pillar pension systems in six Central and Eastern European countries for individual pension wealth. It demonstrates that the post-crisis changes in pension system reduced pension wealth of workers in Poland and increased in Lithuania and Slovakia. The change did not have significant impact on pension wealth in Estonia and Romania. The magnitude of this effect is highest in those countries where the reduction of the fully-funded pension contribution was permanent. Loss or gain in pension wealth varies with age of participants – it is higher for younger people, who will accumulate their pension wealth to a larger extent after the change. The level of the change in pension wealth depends also on the wage level – higher earners lose more relative to the average wage level. The difference in pension wealth depends also on the difference between rates of return in fully funded and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) components of the pension system. The net outcome of post-crisis pension system modifications depends both on the magnitude of fully-funded contribution reduction, but also on the design of PAYG component and the way individual pension rights are accrued. These results indicate the rise in implicit liability of pension system in Slovakia to be higher than the reduction of the explicit liability caused by the pension system change and the lower rise of implicit liability in Poland and Latvia.

This paper uses an OLG-CGE model for the UK to illustrate the long-term effect of migration on the economy. We use the current Conservative Party migration target to reduce net migration “from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands” as an illustration. Achieving this target would require reducing recent net migration numbers by a factor of about 2. We undertake a simulation exercise to compare a baseline scenario, which incorporates the principal 2010-based ONS population projections, with a lower migration scenario, which assumes that net migration is reduced by around 50 per cent. The results show that such a significant reduction in net migration has strong negative effects on the economy. By 2060 the levels of both GDP and GDP per person fall by 11.0 per cent and 2.7 per cent respectively. Moreover, this policy has a significant impact on public finances. To keep the government budget balanced, the effective labour income tax rate has to be increased by 2.2 percentage points in the lower migration scenario.

The aim and scope of this paper is to isolate the effects of population ageing in the context of potential Scottish independence. A dynamic multiregional Overlapping Generations Computable General Equilibrium (OLG-CGE) model is used to evaluate the two scenarios. The status quo scenario assumes that Scotland stays part of the UK and all government expenditures associated with its ageing population are funded on a UK-wide basis. In the independence scenario, Scotland and the rest of the UK pay for the growing demands of their ageing populations independently. The comparison suggests that Scotland is worse off in the case of independence. The effective labour income tax rate in the independence scenario has to increase further compared with the status quo scenario. The additional increase reaches its maximum in 2035 at 1.4 percentage points. The additional rise in the tax rate is non-negligible, but is much smaller than the population ageing effect (status quo scenario) which generates an increase of about 8.5 percentage points by 2060. The difference for government finances between the status quo and independence scenarios is thus relatively small.

This paper reviews three UK-based welfare-to-work programmes featuring time-limited financial incentives to leave out-of-work benefits for employment. The policies considered are (i) the Employment Retention and Advancement demonstration, aimed at lone parents and the long-term unemployed; (ii) In-Work Credit, aimed at lone parents on welfare; (iii) Pathways to Work, aimed at recipients of incapacity benefits. I illustrate the difficulties in extrapolating from specific findings to general policy-relevant conclusions. Finally, I depict the challenge facing evaluators in future and point to the directions in which evaluation will need to develop if it is to contribute more fully to policy-relevant evaluation.

The main claim of this paper is that in a world of equal entitlements to work rights the justification for a basic income is stronger, and that its level should be higher, the higher the level of unemployment or job scarcity. Point of departure is an economy with job scarcity. A fair way to deal with job scarcity is to grant everybody an equal right to work, where these rights can be freely traded. It turns out that such a Labour Rights scheme and a basic income scheme are equivalent. The equivalence is that the price of Labour Rights and the unemployment benefit corresponds to the income tax rate and basic income respectively. The tax rate can thus be considered as what workers have to pay to appropriate scarce job assets. Both schemes allow that some people voluntarily abstain from doing paid work, in return for a financial compensation. Therefore, the advantages in terms of equity and efficiency of a Labour Rights scheme equally apply to the basic income proposal. This analysis provides an argument against cutting unemployment and social assistance benefits during economic downturns and it offers new insights to evaluate the parasitism and exploitation objection raised against basic income.

The main claim of this paper is that in a world of equal entitlements to work rights the justification for a basic income is stronger, and that its level should be higher, the higher the level of unemployment or job scarcity. Point of departure is an economy with job scarcity. A fair way to deal with job scarcity is to grant everybody an equal right to work, where these rights can be freely traded. It turns out that such a Labour Rights scheme and a basic income scheme are equivalent. The equivalence is that the price of Labour Rights and the unemployment benefit corresponds to the income tax rate and basic income respectively. The tax rate can thus be considered as what workers have to pay to appropriate scarce job assets. Both schemes allow that some people voluntarily abstain from doing paid work, in return for a financial compensation. Therefore, the advantages in terms of equity and efficiency of a Labour Rights scheme equally apply to the basic income proposal. This analysis provides an argument against cutting unemployment and social assistance benefits during economic downturns and it offers new insights to evaluate the parasitism and exploitation objection raised against basic income.