This paper examines the impacts of recent Australian welfare to work reforms for low-income parents of school-aged children who had been in receipt of Parenting Payment – the main welfare payment for this group – for at least one year. Specifically, the reforms introduced a requirement to...

This paper contains a first analysis of trends in private social benefits within a comparative framework. There is growing interest in the role of the private sector in the provision of social support in the light of concerns about the high level of public social spending. However, up to now,...

In national accounts social benefits to households are broken down into two distinct categories: social benefits other than social transfers in kind; and social transfers in kind. The former transfers are typically in cash and so allow households to use the cash indistinguishably from other...

Family benefits spending refer to public spending on family benefits, including financial support that is exclusively for families and children. Spending recorded in other social policy areas, such as health and housing, also assist families, but not exclusively, and it is not included in this...

May 2000 - Existing methods for assessing latent country or institutional performance can yield deceptive results. There have been many attempts to infer latent performance attributes of governments (or other institutions) from conditional comparisons that control for observed variables. Success...