In recent years, the discussion about welfare state reform has often focused on the effectiveness of social security schemes. This debate is torn between calls for more effective poverty alleviation on the one hand and concerns about welfare dependency and the need for stronger targeting of...

Empirical studies on income distribution and poverty have indicated that the public transfer system has been successful in terms of poverty and inequality reduction in welfare states. However, very little attention has been paid to private transfers in this analysis. Recently, while there has...

The standard poverty lines applied in empirical research tend to be problematic in terms of validity, reliability, ease of application or socio-political credibility. This paper introduces an international version of an alternative method, which originally has been developed for the Netherlands....

The present study examines the hypotheses that progressive welfare-state policies are likely to increase women's labor force participation, but at the same time to increase both occupational segregation and earning gaps between economically active men and women. Using data from 20 industrialized...

This paper addresses the question of the institutional flexibility of three major European welfare states. Using Data from the second and fifth wave of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we measure first how effectively the German, British and Italian welfare state have responded changes in...

In this paper, we examine the consequences of different welfare state strategies. We argue that four major strategies have appeared: 1) the primary caregiver/secondary earner strategy, focused on valuing the care in which women engage; 2) the primary earner/secondary caregiver strategy, focused...

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....

With a view to better assessment of the roles played by social security and social policy in determining well-being, this presentation introduces the 'decommodified security ratio' (DSR), an instrument for evaluating an important duty of the social State, namely to maintain and improve people's...

In combating poverty, whether or not to design a universal program or a targeted program has been a perpetual dilemma. The objective of this paper is to conduct an international comparison of the 'universality' and 'targeting' of social security systems. The paper presents an outline of...

It is increasingly clear that the United States has adopted a strategic goal to shift federally-funded entitlement programs from a defined benefit to a defined cost basis. A cross-national comparison, this paper discusses the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and its probable effect on other federal...