Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that, on top of many other benefits, it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential poverty-reducing impact of BI strongly depends on exactly how and where it is implemented. Implementing a BI requires far more choices than advocates seem to realise. The level at which a BI is set matters, but its exact specification matters even more. The impact of a BI, be it a low or a high one, also strongly depends on the characteristics of the system that it is (partially) replacing or complementing, as well as the socio-economic context in which it is introduced. Some versions of BI could potentially help to reduce poverty but always at a significant cost and with substantial sections of the population incurring significant losses, which matters for political feasibility. A partial BI complementing existing provisions appears to make more potential sense than a full BI replacing them. The simplicity of BI, however, tends to be vastly overstated.

Cross-sector co-production involving voluntary organisations in the production and delivery of social services has been adopted across many welfare states. Economic and demographic changes have led to increased involvement of volunteer initiatives in different welfare policy fields. How different field properties enable, constrain, and shape co-production practices remains, however, under researched. In this article, we address this shortcoming in a comparative case design exploring the practices of co-production within the two fields of elderly services and refugee services. We develop a conceptual framework and demonstrate that differential distribution of resources leads to diverging outcomes and perspectives for co-production. Based on a two-year in-depth study of one large Danish municipality, we find two forms of co-production practices, which reflect different field conditions. In the field of elderly services, co-production takes the form of ‘embedded’ practices, and in the field of refugee services co-production takes the form of ‘exterior’ practices. We demonstrate that each of these co-production forms entail ambiguous outcomes and antagonistic positions for voluntary and public sector actors, depending on the policy field.

In this article, we examine the relationship between important types of policies for asylum permit holders in the Netherlands and the improvement in their command of Dutch. As far as asylum policy is concerned, we find that participation in activities in the asylum seekers reception centre – and in particular, following Dutch language classes – contribute to an improvement in Syrian asylum permit holders’ command of Dutch. On the other hand, a prolonged period of stay and frequent relocations between reception centres are not favourable. Asylum permit holders who have successfully completed the civic integration programme have a better command of the language than asylum permit holders who are still undergoing the programme. An important finding is that there seems to be a sort of double deficit in the area of civic integration: not only do the elderly and lower educated make less progress in learning Dutch, but they are also the ones more likely to receive a dispensation from the civic integration requirement, which places them at a further disadvantage. Third, we find that early participation in the labour market or as a volunteer is also beneficial for language proficiency.

In light of ongoing debates about income targeting in the welfare state, this article explores how the design and outcomes of income targeting policies are related to popular targeting preferences. Based on the unique combination of fine-grained opinion and policy indicators in a multilevel analysis, the results show that targeting preferences are indeed empirically related to targeting policies. However, whether these preferences are affected more by the de jure targeting design or the de facto targeting outcome seems to vary between two very different policy domains. In the case of unemployment benefits, the results suggest positive policy feedback: support for high-income targeting increases when unemployment benefits are designed to benefit those with previously higher incomes. For income taxation, by contrast, the results suggest negative policy feedback. In that case, it is not so much the de jure design but rather the de facto outcome that matters: the more taxes effectively work to the advantage of higher-income earners, the less support there is for a tax that levies the same amount on everyone, regardless of income.

Home ownership is the largest component of wealth for most households and its intergenerational transmission underpins the production and reproduction of economic inequalities across generations. Yet, little is currently known about ethnic differences in the intergenerational transmission of housing tenure. In this paper, we use linked Census data covering 1971–2011 to document rates of intergenerational housing tenure mobility across ethnic groups in England and Wales. We find that while home ownership declined across all ethnic groups during this period, there were substantial differences between them. Black, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi households experienced the strongest intergenerational link between parent and child housing tenure, and Black individuals had the highest rates of downward housing mobility. In contrast, those of Indian origin had homeownership rates similar to White British families, and a weaker link between parent and child housing tenure. These patterns are likely to exacerbate existing gradients in other dimensions of ethnicity-based inequality, now and in the future.

In 2018, Nigeria began the implementation of a cash transfer programme (CCT) for poor and vulnerable people. We evaluated the impact of cash transfer on household livelihood outcomes in Nigeria. Using multistage cluster sampling methodology, beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries within the same locality were randomly selected to participate in a survey to assess the impact of cash transfer on food security and food diversity.

When gender, marital status, educational status, and age were controlled, beneficiaries were about three times more likely than non-beneficiaries to report experiencing little or no hunger. Children 0–59 months of beneficiaries were twice likely to have at least three meals a day compared to children of non-beneficiaries. Difference in differences regression analysis showed that on the average, beneficiaries of the cash transfer significantly consumed more diverse food than non-beneficiaries. Beneficiaries of the CCT experienced fewer episodes of severe hunger, have more meal frequency, and higher household dietary diversity than non-beneficiaries. This shows that the CCT programme is effective and can directly mitigate adverse effects of malnutrition with its long-term negative impact on children and thus must be expanded to more vulnerable people across all states in Nigeria.

This article presents results of a Dutch randomised experiment, challenging the ‘workfare’ paradigm, which is dominant in many countries. We study whether social assistance (SA) schemes with fewer conditions and more autonomy for recipients stimulate valuable but often overlooked unpaid socio-economic activities (USEA), which are not classified as work. In the qualitative part of the mixed method study, we generated new hypotheses stating that particularly recipients who are older, higher educated, have a migration background, have relatively poor health, or have young children, will spend more time on USEA in less conditional and more autonomous regimes. The quantitative part of the study, where two experimental conditions are compared with the usual treatment of SA recipients, does not show convincing average treatment effects, but does reveal that a less conditional and more autonomy-oriented SA scheme translates into more USEA for older people, people with a migration background and people with relatively poor mental health.

The Netherlands recently experienced a crisis in childcare benefits, leading to ‘unprecedented injustice’ for many parents falsely accused of defrauding the childcare benefit system. This crisis highlights multiple barriers in parents’ ability to access childcare already evident prior to the crisis, including the far-reaching digitalisation of social policies and childcare benefits in particular. Digitalisation can make parents feel childcare services are less accessible, thereby creating or exacerbating existing inequalities in childcare use. Parents may also lack the skills needed to navigate complex application procedures, which can affect their perceived access to childcare benefits, particularly in market-led systems with greater reliance on government benefits to cover the high costs of childcare. Extending recent research on childcare capabilities, we investigate the extent to which digital and functional literacy affect parents’ perceived access to childcare benefits in the Netherlands. The results from our exploratory quantitative analysis provide a starting point for understanding the understudied relationships between digitalisation, parents’ abilities to navigate complex childcare or other policy systems, and their (perceived) ability to access childcare benefits. We use these findings to develop multiple future research recommendations in the childcare policy literature.

Employer family policy tends to be conceived as employers’ response to economic pressures, with the relevance of normative factors given comparatively little weight. This study questions this status quo, examining the normative relevance of public childcare and female leadership to employer childcare. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE), a representative study of private sector employers in the United States. The findings show that public childcare is relevant for those forms of employer childcare more plausibly explained as the result of employers’ normative as opposed to economic considerations. The findings further suggest that female leaders are highly relevant for employer childcare, but that this significance differs depending on whether the form of employer childcare is more likely of economic versus normative importance to employers. The study provides an empirical contribution in that it is the first to use representative data of the United States to examine the relevance of state-level public childcare and female leadership. Its theoretical contribution is to show that normative explanations for employer childcare provision are likely underestimated in U.S. employer family policy research.

Even as education becomes increasingly important for functioning in society, and many welfare states have taken responsibility for providing education, many individuals have insufficient skill levels to fully participate in society. This paper investigates the relationship between literacy skills and basic functioning and participation in society, focusing on the role of the welfare state, and whether individuals with low literacy skills are better off in terms of labour market outcomes, quality of life, digital participation and adult learning in countries with higher investments in active labour market policies (ALMPs), and three underlying spending categories: 1) public employment services, 2) training and 3) private sector employment incentives. Through multi-level analysis of 25 Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and 139,449 individuals, using individual-level data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and country-level data from the OECD, our results show that while low literacy is associated with less favourable conditions related to all outcome variables investigated, ALMPs do not always moderate these negative associations. This is especially true for labour market participation, health and on-the-job training. However, higher ALMP spending is associated with more favourable conditions among low-literate individuals when it comes to job satisfaction, digital participation and life-long learning.

Informal care plays an important role in the provision of care. However, previous research has mainly focused on middle- or older-aged informal carers and less is known about informal care among young adults, its consequences on educational achievement and employment transitions and whether this varies across country contexts. Using data from the 2009–2018 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (N = 25,856) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (N = 16,666), we investigated the influence of informal care responsibilities of 17–29 year olds on their chances of achieving a university degree using logistic regression and employment transitions using Cox proportional hazard regression models. Our results revealed that young adulthood caring was negatively associated with the likelihood of obtaining a university degree, reduced the likelihood of entering employment and increased the likelihood of unemployment. These associations were more pronounced if people reported caring for more weekly hours (especially in the UK) or caring for longer durations (especially in Germany). The potential negative influence of caring in young adulthood on education was stronger for women than for men in Germany, and the influence of caring on entering unemployment was stronger for women than for men in the UK.

COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of ‘COVID exceptionalism’ – with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.

Research on street-level bureaucracy has tended to focus on individual and organisational factors that influence street-level practice. To date, empirical research has insufficiently explored the contribution of wider socio-cultural factors in street-level decision making. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of social assistance in Pakistan, this article examines how cultural patronage practices of sifarish intersect with street-level social welfare operations. Results highlight the importance of sifarish in informing decision-making processes and in enabling access to social assistance. In this manner, people providing sifarish (called sifarishie) operate as informal third-party actors. The findings challenge the dominant view of street-level operation that the decision making at street level is solely guided by individual and organisational factors.

The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly associated with early life circumstances relating to parental housing tenure and education, even after controlling for adult offspring’s own characteristics. Importantly, we find adult offspring whose parents hold a degree and are homeowners are no less likely to report homeownership and housing wealth compared to older cohorts from the same background. Our findings infer the intergenerational rank correlation in housing wealth is set to double in approximately three decades.

Before the Omicron variant ran amok inside China in November 2022, the Chinese central government’s dynamic zero-COVID policy effectively contained the spread of the coronavirus and its variants during multiple waves of outbreaks. However, it was not without cost. This study examines the impacts of stringent lockdown interventions on urban residents’ mental health during the initial outbreak of the Omicron variant in the spring of 2022. Using survey data from 522 respondents within the same neighbourhood and a spatial quasi-experimental design, the results show that strict lockdown interventions are significantly related to higher levels of psychological distress after controlling for observed confounders and that lockdown interventions have further spillover effects on mental health for residents in adjacent residential compounds who are otherwise free. Moreover, the results show that the lack of material supplies and medical care plays a more salient role in explaining lockdown effects on psychological distress than residents’ social interaction and trust levels of COVID-19 policy. Policy and intervention implications are also discussed.

Existing literature shows the importance of maternity leave as a strategy for women to balance work and family responsibilities. However, only a few studies focused on the long-run impact of maternity leave length on maternal health. Therefore, how exactly they are related remains unclear. We examine women’s selection into different lengths of maternity leave as a potential explanation for the inconclusive findings in the literature on the association between maternity leave and maternal health. This study aims to unravel the association between maternity leave length and mothers’ long-term health in Germany. Drawing on detailed data from the German Statutory Pension Fund (DRV), we estimated the association between maternity leave length and sick leave from 3 years following their child’s birth for 4,243 women living in Germany in 2015 by applying discrete-time logistic regression. Our results show a negative relationship between maternity-leave length and long-term maternal health, likely driven by negative health selection. Long maternity leaves of more than 24 months were associated with worse maternal health in the long run, while a positive association emerged for vulnerable women with pre-existing health problems.

The media are often blamed for widespread perceptions that welfare benefit claimants are undeserving in Anglo-Saxon countries – yet people rarely justify their views through media stories, instead saying that they themselves know undeserving claimants. In this paper, I explain this contradiction by hypothesising that the media shapes how we interpret ambiguous interpersonal contact. I focus on disability benefit claimants, which is an ideal case given that disability is often externally unobservable, and test three hypotheses over three studies (all using a purpose-collected survey in the UK and Norway, n=3,836). In Study 1, I find strong evidence that a randomly-assigned ‘benefits cheat’ story leads respondents to interpret a hypothetical disability claimant as less deserving. Study 2 examines people’s judgements in everyday life, finding that readers of more negative newspapers in the UK are much more likely to judge neighbours as non-genuine – but with effectively no impact on judgements of close family claimants, where ambiguity is lower. However, contra my expectations, in Study 3 I find that Britons are no more likely than Norwegians to perceive known claimants as non-genuine (despite more negative welfare discourses), partly because of different conceptions of what ‘non-genuineness’ means in the two countries.

Looking at core features of child and family related spending and policy design, and covering five domains of policy, the paper offers new empirical evidence and an original perspective for better understanding how EU countries and the UK responded to the needs of children and families during the pandemic and how to classify responses in terms of child-centredness. The paper is driven by a concept of child-centredness to examine developments from March to December 2020 in five policy fields: income support, food assistance, early childcare and education services, school opening and support for parental care-giving. The analysis shows strong variation across countries in terms of how active they were and what fields they were active in. One very striking commonality, though, is that the most popular field of policy action was in resourcing parental care of children at home, through paid leaves usually. A related finding is that there was little prioritising of children for most kinds of actions. Thirdly, in terms of national patterning those countries that were generous spenders on this field of policy prior to the pandemic were most child-centred in their response and there are few if any exceptions to this.

The body of research on the take-up of social benefits is growing, but rarely focuses on universal cash benefits, especially in the field of long-term care. This paper is concerned with the long-term care (LTC) allowance in Austria, a universal cash benefit paid to those in need of LTC on seven different levels of dependency. It investigates whether take-up and distribution of the benefit reflect need in terms of age structure and health status of the population, and examines whether local variations in the distribution of benefits can be explained with socio-demographic variables. Combining administrative data on recipients and socio-demographic data on the municipal level with health information shows that higher levels of education and a higher share of foreigners are associated with a lower share of recipients, while a lower average household size increases the share of recipients. Overall, these variations are much stronger for lower levels of care needs than for higher ones. The results suggest variations in take-up that are determined either by non-application (in particular among lower levels of care needs) or discretion and potentially discrimination in the process of claiming the benefit.

The author makes the case that wealth inequality ramifies in the communicative practices of policymaking in ways which produce specific forms of epistemic injustice. Relative epistemic authority between richer and poorer knowers is established by limiting some speakers to being sources of information, and elevating others to the epistemically more sophisticated role of inquirer. In its systemic form, this differentiation has the effect of re-producing and maintaining ‘tracker prejudices’ (Fricker, 2007) and ‘tracker privileges’ (Medina, 2011) which then ramify in relational and distributive inequality (Fricker, 2016). The article suggests that in a context in which the inclusion of ‘lived experience’ has come to be seen as an intrinsic good in policy discourse (Smith-Merry, 2020), the lived experience we need to amplify isn’t that of the poor, it is that of the rich. Only in centring rich voices in social policymaking can we reveal and challenge the operation of wealth privilege and advance reparatory forms of epistemic practice.1