Readers will be aware that one of the Journal of Social Policy's regular features, the Social Policy Digest, is being relaunched as a web-based publication.

Youth unemployment is an issue that has increasingly troubled western countries since the 1970s. This paper provides data on youth unemployment in Australia and the Netherlands, and discusses government policy in both countries. The rate of youth unemployment was similar in both countries in the mid 1980s, but since then it has declined dramatically in the Netherlands, while changing little in Australia. Youth unemployment policy in Australia has been driven by the concept of obligation, while in the Netherlands youth unemployment policy has been organised around the principle of a guarantee for youth. The Dutch labour market programme offers more continuity and coherence than the rather ad hoc Australian programmes. However, the paper argues that youth labour market policy in both countries is of a controlling nature, and does not serve marginalised youth. Moreover, policy in neither country meets OECD criteria for effective labour market programs. The paper concludes with the description of a Dutch program which, to a large extent, does meet the OECD criteria, and demonstrates that a more constructive approach to youth unemployment is possible.

This paper explores the changing fortunes of the public realm during the last two decades. It poses the problem of how we think about globalisation and neo-liberalism as forces driving these changes. It then examines how different aspects of the public realm – understood as public interest, as public services and as a collective identity – have been subjected to processes of dissolution. Different processes have combined in this dissolution – in particular, attempts to privatise and marketise public services have been interleaved with attempts to de-politicise the public realm. Tracing these processes reveals that they have not been wholly successful – encountering resistances, refusals and negotiations that mean the outcomes (so far) do not match the world imagined in neo-liberal fantasies.

A conceptual framework is developed for analysing UK social policy with respect to work, employment, inclusion and income. A range of possibilities for ‘productive engagement in work’ (PEW) outside the home are identified, ranging from formal employment, through informal employment, working for local community currencies, to unpaid voluntary work, each attracting particular policy responses, according to the hegemonic discourse of social exclusion, namely a liberal individualistic model which sees insertion into the labour market as the solution to exclusion. A new initiative is examined which is increasingly being adopted by local authorities in their efforts to tackle social exclusion and build social capital, namely ‘time banks’: a type of community currency which rewards people in time credits for the work they put into their neighbourhoods. Time banks are found to occupy a space in between what is already known about informal employment, LETS (Local Exchange Trading Schemes) and volunteering, raising a number of issues for policy makers and practitioners. While time banks may be promoted within the UK government's social inclusion remit as a means of increasing job-readiness through volunteering, they have wider and deeper implications. They represent a response to a radical social democratic understanding of social exclusion and hence exert a collective effort to redefine what is considered ‘valuable work’, and thus present an alternative to hegemonic paradigms of work and welfare; their greatest potential is as a radical tool for collective social capital building, resulting in more effective social, economic and political citizenship, and hence social inclusion. Policy recommendations are made to enable time banks to flourish and provide a powerful tool for achieving social inclusion objectives.

The growing political and social significance of the voluntary sector in contemporary welfare reform is reflected in a wide body of research that has emerged in the political and social policy literature since the mid-1980s. While this work adds considerably to our understanding of the changing role of the voluntary welfare sector, these accounts are largely aspatial. Yet, geographical perspectives offer important insights into the development of the voluntary sector at both micro-and macro-levels. The purpose of this paper is thus twofold: first we wish to draw attention to what it is that geographers do that may be of interest to those working in the field of social policy; and second, we illustrate why such perspectives are important. Drawing on recently completed work in Glasgow, we demonstrate how geographical approaches can contribute to a greater understanding of the uneven development of the voluntary sector across space and how voluntary organisations become embedded in particular places. By unravelling some of the complex webs of inter-relationships that operate across the geographical and political spaces that extend from national to local we reveal some unique insights into those factors that act to facilitate or constrain the development of voluntary activity across the city with implications for access, service delivery and policy development. Hence, we maintain, that geographical approaches to voluntarism are important for social policy as such approaches argue that where events occur matter to both their form and outcome.

Debates about the meaning of citizenship have grown since the election of the first New Labour government. These debates have tended to focus on the government's assertion of the central role of work in defining the status of citizen, a stance which has increasingly been criticised for devaluing unpaid work such as caring or volunteering. However, the position of those beyond labour market age – older people – has rarely been examined in relation to how citizenship might be defined. At the same time, the concept of social exclusion, heavily utilised by New Labour to characterise those at the margins of society, has at best an ambiguous relevance to older people. This article, based on an exploration of the social, financial and other impacts of additional benefit income for older people, examines how these two concepts might be understood in relation to the position of older people and sketches out what some of the defining characteristics of citizenship might be for them.

Socioeconomic inequalities in health have moved up the policy agenda of older industrial societies. The paper turns the spotlight on this development by exploring how the goal has been represented in England's national policy documents. Rather than one approach, there appears to be a range of understandings of what it means to tackle health inequalities. These understandings can be placed on a continuum, which runs from improving the health of poor groups, through closing the health gaps between those in the poorest circumstances and better-off groups, to addressing the association between socioeconomic position and health across the population. The paper points to common ground between the three approaches to tackling health inequalities, but also to important differences in the moral arguments and causal models on which they rest, and therefore in their policy goals and anticipated policy impacts.

For more than 50 years the United States and Canada maintained illegal-drug policies that followed the same course: a long period of punitive prohibition followed by moderation and an emphasis on drug abuse as a public health problem. Then in the 1980s, the USA reverted to a punitive model while Canada increased its commitment to a health-based approach. Why this divergence after following the same path for so long? In this paper I argue that one factor was Canada's adoption of national health insurance, which guaranteed universal access to health care, including addiction treatment. As the country's most popular policy it was protected against budget cuts during a period of welfare-state retrenchment in the 1980s. In the USA, on the other hand, public health insurance was limited to the elderly and the poor, and addiction treatment services were isolated and stigmatized. Thus the public health side of drug policy was poorly positioned to resist welfare cutbacks and ascendant criminal-justice interests. The experiences of the USA and Canada have implications for policy reformers and for the study of how institutional interests cross policy domains.