This study investigates the impact of Left political institutions on a nation's amount of poverty. Specifically, the analysis tests three possible causal relationships: whether Left political institutions affect poverty separately from the welfare state, channeled through the welfare state, or...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes according to features related to centralisation is...

Although many have expressed concern over whether generous welfare policies discourage the employment of single mothers, scholars have rarely exploited cross-national variability in the generosity of social policies to assess this question. This is the case even though much previous scholarship...

This is a chapter from a report of a comparative study of child support policy in fourteen countries (Skinner, C., Bradshaw, J. and Davidson, J. (2007) Child support policy: an international perspective, Department for Work and Pensions Research Report 405, Leeds: Corporate Document Services....

Radical employment, household structure and stability transformations have created new tensions on the welfare state front, whose social programs were constructed in an era with a wholly different risk profile. Rowntree's poverty cycle clearly exemplifies the postwar picture of an exceptional...

Although the poverty rates among solo mothers vary a lot between countries there is one common feature: solo mothers perform worse in terms of financial resources compared to married or cohabiting mothers. Even in countries with low poverty rates in general, the differences in income between...

The belief that single motherhood is the pre-eminent cause of poverty in America has become a bipartisan cliché. The welfare reform enacted in 1996 was designed, among other things, to discourage single parenthood and to promote marriage. Yet a look at the experiences and policies of other...