Recent government pronouncements in the UK and above all the recent Conservative Party (2008) policy document on welfare reform suggest that US welfare reform is increasingly being taken as a model for the UK. What lessons should the UK draw from US experience? The long established means tested...

Ideological beliefs are of central importance in current debates about the marketization of social security. However, developments in Chile and China suggest that the conventional individualist-collectivist dichotomy, which has framed ideological debates on social security, fails to capture the...

Although social security emerged in the industrial countries as a mechanism for alleviating and preventing poverty, it has had a negligible impact on the problem of poverty in the developing countries. Because of the high incidence of poverty in the Third World and the need for effective...