The challenges posed by an ageing population are major preoccupations of governments throughout the developed world. There are many dimensions to such challenges, and this paper focuses on issues relating to long-term care in old age. The debate around such matters has been similar in the UK and...

It is widely believed that domestic outsourcing is booming. Many believe the growth of market services is a response to increasing time pressures arising from new responsibilities in the paid workforce, and to an inflexible sexual division of labour at home. The interpretation of the...

The concept of social exclusion has become the central organising concept in social policy research, especially in Europe. The term ‘social exclusion’ has displaced many of the terms formerly in use, such as ‘inequality’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’. Social exclusion is a...

A significant feature of the organisation of public affairs in the 1990s in liberal welfare states has been a rebirth of contractualism. In Australia, the provision of social security and employment assistance to unemployed people has been characterised by an incremental shift away from...

This article proposes an ‘equivalence scale for time’ by which information on total working time in both paid and unpaid labour can be derived from information about paid working time and household structure. Different scales are offered for males and females, and an adjustment according to...

The last decade has witnessed an important shift in public policy concerning retirement incomes, and correspondingly, in the roles of the state and the market in financing provisions for older Australians. The Hawke/Keating Labor Government, which institutionalised compulsory superannuation for...

Poverty measurement in Australia has typically excluded the self-employed because of concerns about a weak relationship between their measured incomes and their living standards. At the same time, however, families containing self-employed individuals receive substantial income support. Is this...