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Social investment policies have enjoyed prominence during recent welfare reforms across the OECD world, and yet there is insufficient long-term strategy for their success. Reviewing labour market, family and education policies, this edited collection analyses the emergence of social investment policies in both Europe and East Asia. Adopting a life course perspective and examining both public and private investments, this book addresses key contemporary policy issues including care, learning, work, social mobility and inequalities. Providing original observations, this seminal text explores the roads and barriers towards effective social investment policies, derives practical social policy implications and highlights important lessons for future policymaking.

Policy Press

Research in Comparative and Global Social Policy

Welfare Reform and Social Investment Policy in Europe and East Asia: International Lessons and Policy Implications

Research into minimum income standards and reference budgets around the world is compared in this illuminating collection from leading academics in the field. From countries with long established research traditions to places where it is relatively new, contributors set out the different aims and objectives of investigations into the minimum needs and requirements of populations, and the historical contexts, theoretical frameworks and methodological issues that lie behind each approach. For policymakers, practitioners and social policy and poverty academics, this essential review of learnings to date and future prospects for research is all the more relevant in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, testing health and social protection systems around the globe.

Minimum Income Standards and Reference Budgets: International and Comparative Policy Perspectives

Katharina Zimmermann

This book reviews how local social and employment policy fields react to the European Social Fund (ESF) to determine the role of the ESF in local activation policies. Drawing on both sociology and political science literature on welfare state reforms, the author examines what shapes local policy reactions to ESF and what effects these reactions have on change in local policy fields. Comparing data from 18 local case studies across 6 European countries, and deploying an innovative mixed-method approach, the book presents comparative evidence on everyday challenges in the context of the ESF and discusses how these findings are applicable to other funding schemes.

Local Policies and the European Social Fund: Employment Policies Across Europe

Hansen, Magnus

Activation policies which promote and enforce labour market participation continue to proliferate in Europe and constitute the reform blueprint from centre-left to centre-right, as well as for most international organizations. Through an in-depth study of four major reforms in Denmark and France, this book maps how co-existing ideas are mobilised to justify, criticise and reach activation compromises and how their morality sediments into the instruments governing the unemployed. By rethinking the role of ideas and morality in policy changes, this book illustrates how the moral economy of activation leads to a permanent behaviourist testing of the unemployed in public debate as well as in local jobcentres.

The Moral Economy of Activation: Ideas, Politics and Policies

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book brings together leading international authors from a number of fields to provide an up-to-date understanding of part-time work at national, sector, industry and workplace levels. The contributors critically examine part-time employment in different institutional settings across Europe, the USA, Australia and Korea. This analysis serves as a prism to investigate wider trends, particularly in female employment, including the continued increase in part-time work and processes that are increasingly creating dualisation and inequality between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs.

Dualisation of Part-Time Work: The Development of Labour Market Insiders and Outsiders

Greve, Bent

In the wake of the financial crisis, and with increasing numbers of people in precarious and low paid jobs, there has been a surprising surge of support for populist right-wing political parties who often promote an anti-welfare message. Tougher approaches and welfare chauvinism are on the agenda in many countries, with policies which reduce the welfare state for those seen as undeserving and changes that often disproportionally benefit the rich. Why are voters seemingly not concerned about growing inequality? Using a mixed-methods approach and newly released data, this book aims to answer this question and to show possible ways forward for welfare states.

Welfare, Populism and Welfare Chauvinism

Trude Sundberg

East Asian societies and welfare systems are rapidly changing, creating an increasing need for research that can help to establish sustainable and legitimate welfare systems. 
This original volume considers welfare attitudes in East Asia, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan, using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Proposing new methods and approaches to analysing cross-national variations in welfare attitudes, it decentralises dominant European-based concepts and measurements and takes approaches that are sensitive to cultural and political trajectories and the impact of colonialism and gender. 
This book explores the influence of contextual and individual factors, such as family roles and values, on citizens’ welfare attitudes. It also studies social legitimacy and social bonds to understand how to design and implement sustainable welfare policies.