This article reports the experiences of 109 homeless people aged seventeen to twenty-five years in England who were resettled into independent accommodation during 2007/08. It focuses on housing, finances, employment and access to support services. After fifteen/eighteen months, 69 per cent of the young people were still in their original accommodation, 13 per cent had moved to another tenancy and 18 per cent no longer had a tenancy. Most were glad to have been resettled but found the transition very challenging, particularly with regard to managing finances and finding stable employment. The prevalence of debts increased substantially over time, and those who moved to private-rented accommodation had the poorest outcomes. People who had been in temporary accommodation more than twelve months prior to resettlement were more likely to retain a tenancy, while a history of illegal drug use and recent rough sleeping were associated negatively with tenancy sustainment.

This article draws on detailed case studies of Pakistani-origin individuals in the UK to explore the complex and extraordinary financial and practical support they provide to family members within their neighbourhood and to family abroad in Pakistan. The article investigates the practice of remitting and the impact on those remitting funds abroad in the context of the struggles and multiple obligations they face on a daily basis in making ends meet. It is set against the political backdrop of the Conservative Party's ‘Big Society’ and ‘Broken Britain’ agenda, which points to the disintegration of values and duty and obligation in contemporary Britain. Contrary to the standards of ‘selfishness and individualism’, the article argues that religious and cultural values compel individuals to provide unrequited support, which often creates very difficult financial and practical situations, resulting in the need to compromise individuals’ own needs and opportunities.

This article explores the application of Lipsky's (1980) notion of street-level bureaucracy for nursing staff. This article aims to demonstrate the importance of discretion within the day-to-day work of front-line nursing staff, which is similar to that of other public-sector workers. The findings are from an exploratory case study based within a Scottish inner-city hospital. It specifically focuses on how nurses can be seen to be street-level bureaucrats and how front-line nursing staff interpret policy. Discretion can be seen to be a significant feature within the front-line practice of nursing staff and this may have implications for the implementation of health policy.

In order to assess people's preferences regarding potential reforms of the Irish state pension system, we surveyed a sample of the Irish adult population about their opinion on a selection of measures and issues related to the redistributive principles and parameters of the pension scheme. Even though very few people are well informed about the pension system, we observe a kind of homogeneity regarding perceptions about the way public pension benefits should be provided. As far as we know, this article represents the first attempt to elicit people's preferences for reforming the state Irish pension system using stated preferences techniques.

People with cognitive impairments are regularly denied access to the vote in democratic nations. At the same time, the accuracy of legal regulations is uncertain due to the variety of legal classifications and the vague administrative procedures envisaged for their implementation. This article offers an extensive analysis of the accuracy of legal restrictions on the vote for people with cognitive impairments in all electoral democracies. The article argues that the prospect of ever regulating the vote accurately, in the sense of avoiding both misclassifications and arbitrary administration of restrictions, is difficult to envisage. In the face of the regulatory problems associated with the attempt to restrict the vote for people with cognitive impairment, it is concluded that enfranchisement of all adult citizens would constitute an improvement.

Discussion of welfare regimes and welfare state ideal types continues to dominate comparative social policy analysis, but the focus of the debate has expanded considerably since the publication of Esping-Andersen's (1990) groundbreaking The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Shifts in this debate have been prompted by a mixture of theoretical and empirical concerns raised by comparative social policy scholars, but they have also resulted from a more general internationalisation of social policy research agendas within the academy too. In particular, there has been a strong desire to expand the scope of the debate to encompass nations and regions not included in Esping-Andersen's initial study of just eighteen high income OECD states.

China's welfare system has been a typical ‘residual welfare regime’, but the economic reform and market-oriented transformations in recent decades have weakened the original well-balanced ‘residual’ and ‘needs’ pattern. Marketisation of social welfare has intensified social inequality as those who are less competitive in the market-oriented economy have encountered tremendous financial burdens in meeting their welfare needs. In order to rectify the social problems and tensions generated from the process of marketisation of social welfare, the Chinese government has adopted different policy measures to address the pressing welfare demands from the citizens. This article examines how a local government in Guangzhou, capital city of Guangdong province, has responded to the call of the central government in promoting social harmony in the context of growing welfare regionalism emerging in mainland China. More specifically, with reference to a case study of Guangzhou, this article discusses how Guangzhou residents assess their social welfare needs and expectations, and how they evaluate the municipal government's major welfare strategies. It also reflects upon the role of the state in welfare provision and social protection, especially when many social welfare and social services have been marketised in the last few decades in China.

Since 2003 the rapid development of China's social policy has aroused much academic interest. This research places the development of social policy in China's political and economic context, focusing on the changing role of the state in making and implementing social policy. Based on the policy paradigm theory, this article builds up a framework to analyse the shift of social policy paradigms in post-Mao China, examining the changing role of the Chinese state in social welfare and social development. It argues that China's latest round of social policy expansion was driven by the social problems accumulated during the economic reforms, with change triggered by the SARS crisis, and its shape finally determined by the central political leadership led by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in a top-down manner.

Despite their geographical proximity, and similarities in ethnic composition and political contexts, Hong Kong's and Macao's social policies have not been compared in the literature. This article aims to compare the welfare regimes between these two city-states. The comparison involves two dimensions: the pattern of welfare mix, and the modification impact of social policy on the capitalist social structure. It is found that the two states’ patterns of welfare mix have much in common, and their social policies are both marked by a relatively low level of modification impact. Therefore, the conclusion is drawn that Hong Kong and Macao can be grouped into a distinct welfare regime. The major contributions of this study are that it helps add to the understanding of East Asian social policy and suggests a useful framework for comparing welfare regimes.

In the context of the discussion about the governance capacity of small states in the world market raised by Katzenstein, the case of East Asian newly industrialised countries is an interesting one. This article takes the development of social policy in Taiwan as a case study through which to explore the role of social policy in the process of rapid industrialisation in small states. It is argued that in the initial phase of industrialisation the productive component of social policy was highlighted by the developmental state to serve the goal of economic development. Social policy functioned at this stage as an effective instrument to dampen the cost of labour and thus contributed to the low-cost strategy of developmental state. Since the 1980s, however, social policy has been profoundly transformed as a consequence of economic globalisation on the one hand and domestic democratisation on the other. It is argued that social policy making since the 1990s in Taiwan has shifted in emphasis from the productive to the consumptive component. Finally, it is suggested that three factors will be decisive in determining Taiwan's social policy in the future: limited governmental revenues, fiscal strain due the public debt problem and the steering capacity of minority governments.

The extent to which social protection programmes in general, and targeted programmes in particular, actually alleviate poverty has been a central issue in development debates for decades. The objective of this article is to contribute to the debate by empirically examining the poverty-alleviation effects of one of the largest targeted programmes in the world: the Minimum Living Standard Assistance (MLSA) or Dibao in China. Using newly available data on MLSA spending and a unique panel survey dataset covering the 1993 to 2009 period, this research investigates the impact of the MLSA on poverty alleviation. The analyses using fixed-effects and random-effects logit models and hierarchical liner models offer insights that go beyond the existing studies on the subject. Findings from the study confirm that targeted social protection programmes are an effective tool for reducing poverty.

This article rounds off the themed section by reviewing broader debates within welfare state modelling relevant to Greater China. More specifically, it examines the now well-established literature around the East Asian ‘model’ of welfare, and related debates on the notion of a ‘productive welfare’ model. In so doing, it challenges simplistic classifications that present the region as representing a single model of welfare and, instead, highlights the diversity of welfare provision found within both Greater China and East Asia more generally. Building on the authors’ earlier published work comparing East Asian welfare systems with those found across the OECD, it also challenges claims that the region is home to a distinct ‘productive’ model of welfare. The article ends by highlighting some key drivers that will shape future debates.

The literature on welfare in Greater China is large and growing. The references for the articles in this themed section provide a good starting point for exploring the literature for each of the cases in the region.