This article presents the findings of a review of the impact of non-contributory cash transfers on individuals and households in low- and middle-income countries, covering the literature of 15 years, from 2000 to 2015. Based on evidence extracted from 165 studies, retrieved through a systematic search and screening process, this article discusses the impact of cash transfers on 35 indicators covering six outcome areas: monetary poverty; education; health and nutrition; savings, investment and production; work; and empowerment. For most of the studies, cash transfers contributed to progress in the selected indicators in the direction intended by policymakers. Despite variations in the size and strength of the underlying evidence base by outcome and indicator, this finding is consistent across all outcome areas. The article also investigates unintended effects of cash transfer receipt, such as potential reductions in adult work effort and increased fertility, finding limited evidence for such unintended effects. Finally, the article highlights gaps in the evidence base and areas which would benefit from additional future research.

The advent of super-diversity and politicisation of migration has been accompanied by heightened interest in migrant settlement. Much has been written in policy and academic fields about the importance of integration, particularly in relation to the settlement of refugees. However, little attention has been paid to the varied settlement experiences of individual refugees, or how personal, cultural and experiential factors combine to influence settlement experiences. This paper turns to cross-cultural psychology's discussion of acculturation processes and, in particular, Berry's acculturation strategies (Berry, 1997) to look at the different factors that influence acculturation and how these factors impact upon the ability of individual refugees to integrate. Using qualitative data collected from 138 interviews with refugees living in Birmingham, England, the paper shows how a range of group and individual factors, relating to their experiences both in refugees’ home and host countries, influences the acculturation strategies adopted by different refugees. It shows that in the current policy environment many refugees lack choice about acculturation strategy, are vulnerable to psychosocial stress and struggle to integrate.

This article suggests that an alternative to a social rights of citizenship approach to comparing welfare states is to use disaggregated programme expenditure data to identify the diverse spending priorities of different types of welfare state. An initial descriptive analysis shows that four major categories of social spending (cash spending on older people and those of working age; service spending on health and for other purposes) are almost entirely unrelated to one another and that different welfare state regimes or families of nations exhibit quite different patterns of spending. The article proceeds to demonstrate that both the determinants and the outcomes of these different categories of spending also differ quite radically. In policy terms, most importantly, the article shows that cross-national differences in poverty and inequality among advanced nations are to a very large degree a function of the extent of cash spending on programmes catering to the welfare needs of those of working age.

The label ‘modernisation’, originally coined to signify reform within the Labour Party, has since 1997 increasingly been used as a descriptor of various facets of public policy. This paper addresses three questions, all in the context of health policy. What (if anything) is the impact of the notion of modernisation on NHS medical labour process, what is its substantive content, and how might we explain its rise to prominence? On the first question, I suggest that a model of medicine (which I term ‘scientific-bureaucratic medicine’) is being developed that embodies many of the specific characteristics of Fordist labour processes. On the second question, I suggest that ‘modernisation’ denotes a philosophy towards the governance of the NHS which entails the distinctive characteristics of the project which social theorists have termed ‘modernity’. The third question has particular significance in a social context (variously termed ‘late modernity’ or ‘postmodernity’) generally thought of as characterised by trends towards postFordist labour processes. I tentatively suggest that scientific-bureaucratic medicine can be viewed as the state's (not necessarily successful) strategy for coping with radical consumerism and changing perceptions of risk and expertise in the context of health and medicine.

Welfare states are highly innovative when it comes to dealing with care. The range of policies in place across nations is striking as is the degree to which making provision for care cuts across long-standing principles of social provision. This article focuses on care as a policy good, identifying care as an inherently social activity and linking it with different manifestations in and anticipated outcomes of public policy. Care is developed here as one of the key activities connecting state and society. Making provision for care, it is argued, affects a whole series of societal settlements. A consideration of a number of such settlements helps to identify factors which must be taken into account when we assay the relationship between public policy, care and society. The following are primary considerations: choices around receiving care, the choice to give care, gender equity, the legitimising of care, the welfare mix, public as against private expenditure, the demand for and supply of paid and unpaid labour. Having considered some of the main variations which are to be found in European welfare states' handling of care, the article goes on to conjecture about possible outcomes of a range of policy responses on the basis of the above considerations. All provisions have particular strengths and weaknesses but ‘quality’, understood in a broad sense, is elusive to any single measure.

Focussing on the psychosocial dimensions of poverty, the contention that shame lies at the ‘irreducible absolutist core’ of the idea of poverty is examined through qualitative research with adults and children experiencing poverty in diverse settings in seven countries: rural Uganda and India; urban China; Pakistan; South Korea and United Kingdom; and small town and urban Norway. Accounts of the lived experience of poverty were found to be very similar, despite massive disparities in material circumstances associated with locally defined poverty lines, suggesting that relative notions of poverty are an appropriate basis for international comparisons. Though socially and culturally nuanced, shame was found to be associated with poverty in each location, variably leading to pretence, withdrawal, self-loathing, ‘othering’, despair, depression, thoughts of suicide and generally to reductions in personal efficacy. While internally felt, poverty-related shame was equally imposed by the attitudes and behaviour of those not in poverty, framed by public discourse and influenced by the objectives and implementation of anti-poverty policy. The evidence appears to confirm the negative consequences of shame, implicates it as a factor in increasing the persistence of poverty and suggests important implications for the framing, design and delivery of anti-poverty policies.

Carers occupy an ambiguous position within the social care system. Services are predominantly structured around the dependant rather than the carer, and this has important consequences for their delivery and evaluation. Many of the problems that arise in thinking about carer issues relate to confusion over the way the relationship between social care agencies and informal carers should be perceived. The paper outlines three models that provide frames of reference for this relationship: carers as resources; carers as co-workers; and carers as co-clients. The tensions between these are then used to explore the contradictions of policy in this field.

Three approaches to defining poverty levels are discussed—social consensus approaches, budget standard methods, and behavioural approaches. Each addresses different questions and none, of itself, has provided—nor, it is argued, could ever provide—an objective definition of poverty. The paper then raises problems that have been largely neglected in defining poverty. First, the treatment of time and home production: the time and ability of individuals to prepare food or to wash and feed without assistance, for example, vary greatly depending on circumstances and in turn affect income needs. Choices and constraints affecting the household formations in which people live and their budgeting behaviour are also important in assessing poverty. Individual variations in behaviour need to be explicitly recognised if practical definitions of poverty levels are to be found. Finally, the paper condemns discussions of poverty that are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

A strong international reform agenda has been established around the idea that benefit recipients must be ‘activated’ to find jobs. This approach, which has found support across the political spectrum in times of affluence and austerity, rests on previously contested assumptions about human motivation, choice, action and personal responsibility. This article considers the largely untested assumptions within UK welfare-to-work policies and marketised employment services, which are designed to control and modify behaviour through compulsion and incentives. It examines those assumptions in relation to conceptualisations of human agency drawn from social policy literature. A gap is identified between accounts of agency grounded in the lived experiences of social actors (policy-makers, front-line workers and service users) and hypothetical models of individual agency (e.g. ‘rational economic man’) which have been more influential in policy design. It is argued that scope exists for understandings of agency to encompass the motivations, intentions and actions of all social actors involved in the policy process. This highlights the power dynamics of context creation, the universal potential for malevolence and the weight of moral significance. Conceptual and empirical insights point towards understanding the enactment of agency as relational, dynamic, differentiated, interconnected, interdependent, intersubjective and interactive.

This article addresses the role of grandparents as providers of childcare for their grandchildren, and the importance of this role in helping the mothers to enter the labour market. Several childcare surveys indicate that grandparents make a very important contribution, which appears to be sustained over time. Demographic modelling shows that the chances of young children having a maternal grandmother under 70 have risen since 1981, although she is now less likely to live nearby.

New evidence from the UK Time Use Survey suggests that grandparents' help has an important influence on whether mothers of young children do take employment, especially those with lower earnings potential. This help also enables them to work longer hours and earn more. However, employed older women play a considerably smaller role in childcare for other households than those without jobs. Analysis of childcare trends from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) suggests that help from relatives, of whom the biggest category are known from several other sources to be grandparents, has become an important complement to part-time formal care as pre-school places expanded since the late 1990s. Raising employment rates amongst the over 50s is an established objective of government policy, yet it may conflict with the role of younger grandparents in childcare.

This article examines in detail some recent data on the living standards of elderly people. It is argued that poverty is related to low resources and restricted access to resources and therefore the article includes summarized information about a wide range of benefits and services. Questions are raised concerning the various social policies and processes which have contributed to the creation of poverty and dependency in old age. The growing importance of retirement is singled out for attention as one significant factor contributing to the depressed social status of the elderly, and as part of the general tendency in British society to devalue the worth of elderly people. It is this social relationship between age and the labour market which deserves attention from policy-makers, who have tended to concentrate on the consequences rather than the causes of dependency.

This article charts the rise of one of the UK's most high profile forms of food banks: the Trussell Trust Foodbank franchise. Employing empirical data it seeks to embed the phenomenon of the growth of Foodbanks within a social policy research context. In the first instance, the role of recent and on-going shifts in the social policy context are examined, notably the importance of welfare diversification under previous Labour governments (1997–2010) and the current public spending cuts, welfare restructuring and Big Society rhetoric of the Conservative−Liberal Democrat Coalition government. The paper goes on to explore the nature of Foodbanks as emergency initiatives, providing relief and alleviation for the ‘symptoms’ of food insecurity and poverty. Data are presented which demonstrate some of the ways in which the Foodbank model and those who run the projects navigate the tension between addressing symptoms rather than ‘root causes’ of poverty and food insecurity. In the face of the simultaneous growth in emergency food initiatives and significant upheavals in social policy and welfare provision, the article culminates with an argument for social policy research and practice to harness and prioritise the human rights-based approach to food experiences.

Improving children's lives is high on the UK policy agenda. In this study for a recent birth cohort of UK children we examine how three aspects of parental resources – income, mother's mental well-being and family status – in early childhood enhance or compromise their children's cognitive and behavioural development. As well as examining how these three aspects of parental resources separately and jointly affect children's well-being, we also enquire whether persistent poverty or persistent maternal depression are more deleterious for children's current well-being than periodic episodes of poverty and depression. We find strong associations between poverty and young children's intellectual and behavioural development, and persistent poverty was found to be particularly important in relation to children's cognitive development. Maternal depression (net of other factors) was more weakly related to cognitive development but strongly related to whether children were exhibiting behaviour problems, and persistent depression amplified the situation. Family status, net of other factors (most noticeably poverty), was only weakly associated with children's development.

Citizenship is, once again, on the political and academic agenda. This article explores some of its meanings for women. It examines some of the contradictions raised by notions of dependence and independence and the relationship between ‘private’ and ‘public’ forms of dependence. It then considers the implications of financial dependence and of the sexual division of labour and of time for women's rights and obligations as social, political and ‘active’ citizens. It concludes by drawing out briefly some policy implications, arguing that radical changes are needed in domestic life and in the organisation of paid employment and state provisions, if women are to be full citizens. This will require changing both our conceptions of Citizenship and the structures which fashion citizenship rights. Ultimately, neither the question of dependency nor of citizenship can be divorced from that of power.

This article explores whether human service organisations in the voluntary sector possess characteristics which might assure them of possible comparative advantages over the for-profit and public sectors with respect to certain sorts of users. We argue that there are inherent structural characteristics of organisations in each sector (for example, ownership, stakeholders and resources) which predispose them to respond more or less sensitively to different states of ‘disadvantage’ experienced by their users. These states are defined as financial, personal, societal and community disadvantage. We suggest that voluntary organisations have a comparative advantage over other sector agencies in areas where their distinctive ambiguous and hybrid structures enable them to overcome problems of principal–agent gap, median voter reluctance, weak messages from politicians to staff and lack of market interest.

By taking ideas of comparative advantage into account, a coherent case can be developed regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the expanded role of voluntary agencies in welfare provision. In essence, the article contends that a diminution in stakeholder ambiguity, resulting from organisational growth, lowers the comparative advantage of voluntary agencies.

This article draws on data from a survey of 400 refugees and shows low levels of labour market activity. The minority of refugees who are working are in secondary sector jobs with little opportunity for progression. Moreover, refugees with high levels of skills who are working are not in jobs commensurate with their skills and qualifications. The article examines the human capacity and personal characteristics that have an impact on refugee employment, and finds the greatest difference in employment is between men and women, although English language fluency and training are also very important. Employment is a major part of the refugee integration strategy, and employment initiatives focus on capacity-building rather than discrimination or reversing restrictive policies. The article concludes that strategies need to focus on individual employability as well as measures to overcome personal and structural barriers to the labour market.

This article examines three comparative perspectives on East Asian welfare systems with special reference to Japan and Korea. First, an expenditure approach shows that the levels of government spending in Japan and Korea are lower than in UK and Sweden, but it necessarily underestimates the welfare expenditure publicly spent in Japan and Korea, due to the regulator type of policy intervention in financing welfare programmes. Second, the standard analysis of cross-sectional redistribution shows that social and fiscal policies have made only a small impact on income distribution, but the profiles of policy intervention reveal the distinctive characteristics of social security systems in these two countries. Lastly, this article examines the welfare systems in Japan and Korea in the light of Esping-Andersen's conservative welfare regime type. It argues that the welfare systems in these two countries do not fit into the type of the conservative welfare state and suggests that there is a case for an ‘East Asian welfare model’, at least regarding Japan and Korea.

Volunteering is perceived as important for creating social capital and civil society, and therefore has become a fundamental part of social policies across most Western countries. In this article, we examine the involvement of governments, corporations and educational institutes in encouraging volunteering, and pinpoint their role in developing volunteering circles. Based on essential concepts presented here (volunteerability and recruitability), we develop the third-party model, and show how third parties get involved. We identify new ways in which these parties can enhance volunteering, and discuss their impact on volunteerability and recruitability. The potential negative impacts of volunteerism and ways in which these can be ameliorated are also acknowledged. Finally, issues that arise due to such involvement are also discussed, thereby offering an important contribution to social policy research in the area of volunteerism.

The use of behavioural economics to inform policy has over recent years been captured by those who advocate nudge interventions. Nudge is a non-regulatory approach that attempts to motivate individual behaviour change through subtle alterations in the choice environments that people face. It is argued in this article that government interventions ought to be more overt than that traditionally advocated by nudge adherents, and that governments should principally attempt to influence behaviour if the acts of those targeted are causing harm to others. With this in mind, governments can use the findings of behavioural economics, including present bias and loss aversion, to inform where and how to regulate directly against undesirable private sector activities. This behavioural economic-informed method of regulation is hereby termed budge, to indicate that, rather than nudging citizens, behavioural economics might be used more appropriately in the public sector to help inform regulation that budges harmful private sector activities.

Education is crucially important for later outcomes but has received limited attention in comparative research on welfare states. In light of this, we present an exploratory analysis of education systems across fourteen EU countries and the US. This builds on existing work on educational institutions, educational outcomes and welfare regimes. We focus on institutional features associated with inequality of educational opportunity, including academic selection, tracking and public/private provision; on educational outcomes; and on education expenditure. Our quantitative analysis identifies four clusters of countries: the Nordic, Continental, Mediterranean and English-speaking, which bear similarities to those identified in the welfare states literature. Each ‘education regime’ is associated with particular institutional features, educational outcomes and levels of public expenditure. Our analysis suggests that further comparative research on education, viewed as a key component of the welfare state, is warranted.