Affordable, good quality childcare creates opportunities for many parents to better reconcile work and care or reduces family care to enable other valuable contributions to society. However, childcare studies often overlook parents of children with additional or complex care needs. These parents spend a greater amount of time on caregiving, providing care that goes beyond that of parents of typically developing children. As such, their opportunities beyond caregiving can be limited. Resources, like childcare services, can be crucial in supporting the reconciliation of care with other valued activities in life. This article contributes to the cross-national childcare policy literature by conceptualizing comparative indicators to assess the availability, accessibility, and affordability of childcare policy design for children with additional or complex care needs. It then applies these indicators to a comparison of childcare policy design in England and the Netherlands, providing an operationalization for further empirical analysis.

In this article, I present an analysis of the conditions that led to the success of an NGO coalition to challenge and bring about the suspension of a workfare program in Israel. I compare the Israeli contention against workfare with similar mobilizations that took place in France and Germany, in order to identify conditions that may enhance challenges to the politics of conditionality. I argue that the success of collective action against a workfare programme in Israel was precipitated by the formation of a loose coalition of civil society organizations which succeeded in seizing opportunities, gaining access to institutionalized political systems, and mobilizing allies from the ranks of political elites. Moreover, I demonstrate these opportunities’ fluidity, such that the loss of certain allies engendered the workfare programme’s rebirth. The article concludes by outlining lessons that can be learned from this case.

Ageing of society and long-term care (LTC) for the elderly are becoming hot topics on most European countries’ social and economic policy agendas. Increasing demand for the financing of LTC raises the necessity for a search for social policy alternatives without further increasing pressure on national budgets. The social investment approach is seen as an argument in favour of interpreting social expenditure as a ‘productive factor’ (ILO. (2005). Social protection as a productive factor. GB.294/ESP/4. Geneva, p. 2). This approach to welfare systems argues that social expenditure might be seen as investment that produces economic and social returns in time. The perception of what social investment is in relation to the LTC for the elderly is not clear either in public or academic discussion. In responding to this lacuna, this article analyses the views of LTC stakeholders in Lithuania concerning: the system and its challenges; what factors they consider as most significant to successful LTC policies and their implementation; and how the concept of social investment should be understood.

Social protection has expanded unevenly across Africa because of variations in both the initial adoption of programmes and their subsequent ‘institutionalisation’ through government-funded expansions in coverage. The case of Zambia illustrates how policy coalitions promoting the institutionalisation of social protection compete with other claimants over prioritisation in public spending. Even when faced with competitive elections, incumbent governments may prioritise other programmes over social protection. In Zambia, the incumbent government announced and budgeted for a massive government-funded expansion of social protection but failed to allocate the necessary funding – with the result that benefits were not paid to registered beneficiaries. If ‘institutionalisation’ is understood as entailing the political irreversibility of expansion, then the rhetoric of institutionalisation belied the reality (for several years) of retrenchment. The weakened policy coalition supporting social protection was unable to prevent government defunding as scarce government resources were allocated to competing programmes.

This paper tests whether in a PAYG system there is an inter-generational balance between the contributions made during the working-career and the pension benefit received in retirement; covering different cohorts. The analysis takes Malta as a case study. Though the dependency ratio is comparatively low, the population is rapidly ageing. The results show that there is a generational imbalance with the young cohort unlikely to be any better off than those who have already retired. This however is sensitive to the assumed discount rate and the ‘no policy’ change scenario. The results also show that future generations may be net-gainers assuming a sustained level of wage growth. If, on the other hand, wage growth slows, the younger generation may become increasingly reliant on the bequests of older generations. This would explain why pressure has increased to regularly adjust the existing PAYG system as well to introduce other forms of pension schemes.

Little is known about government policies that regulate economic transfers between separated parents (child support) outside of high-income countries. This paper provides the first broad overview of child support policy and its outcomes in 37 middle- and low-income countries. Using a systematic literature review, we provide information on child support policies in these countries, considering institutional arrangements, procedures for determining how much child support is due and how obligations are enforced. Using descriptive statistics on individual-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, we show that poverty rates are high among lone-mother families and that fewer than one-third of lone mothers receive child support. Among those who receive, however, amounts average over $3,600 US$/year, making child support an important income source for some. We discuss how current policies and their estimated outcomes are similar to (or differ from) the previous work that focused on high-income countries.

The ideas, practicalities, and challenges of establishing effective social protection in Africa are steadily, if somewhat slowly, gaining notice in both policy-making forums and mainstream social policy analysis. The world’s second largest and populous continent, Africa is also its poorest region, with chronic poverty, vulnerabilities, and preventable hardship. Despite some significant developments in social welfare interventions and outcomes since the turn of the century, the policy agenda and dynamics in most countries remain complex and tenuous, arguably more so than other lower and middle income (LMIC) regions. This special edition contributes to a critical analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing social protection systems in Africa. It also seeks to examine the extent to which the staple explanatory concepts of welfare dynamics in the northern and western hemispheres – the role of actors, ideas, and institutions – need to be modified or adapted when analysing welfare dynamics in Africa. The focus is on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rather than the more diverse and heterogeneous Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. While, it is important to acknowledge that SSA nations are also distinct and varied; nevertheless, they share important characteristics in terms of historical contexts, average incomes, development outcomes, and most relevant for the purpose of this analysis, social policy strategies, and challenges.