Household survey estimates of retirement income suffer from substantial underreporting which biases downward measures of elderly financial well-being. Using data from both the 2016 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), matched with administrative records, we examine to what extent underreporting of retirement income affects key statistics: elderly reliance on social security benefits and poverty. We find that retirement income is underreported in both the CPS ASEC and the HRS. Consequently, the relative importance of social security income remains overstated – 53 percent of elderly beneficiaries in the CPS ASEC and 49 percent in the HRS rely on social security for the majority of their incomes compared to 42 percent in the administrative data. The elderly poverty rate is also overstated – 8.8 percent in the CPS ASEC and 7.4 percent in the HRS compared to 6.4 percent in the administrative data.

India is being projected internationally as a country of good growth and good governance, which in turn, it is asserted, should lead to prosperity for its people, especially in terms of proper employment, income, and overall standard of living. Drawing on certain dimensions of decent work proposed by International Labour Organization to measure the quality of employment in India, this article explores how far the notions of good/high growth and good governance discourse are corroborated by the evidence of good quality employment in India. The study is based on the nationally representative unit/individual-level data published by the Government of India during the three periods 2009–10, 2018–19, and 2022–23. The main findings of analysis are: (a) the overall quality of employment in India is poor and stagnant or deteriorating, and (b) the macro-level (sub-national state-level) aspects, such as the overall volume of economic activities, the extent of quality governance, the flexibility of business regulatory environment and better labour law-related compliance, have had a significant negative influence on the quality of employment. Thus, this paper suggests that the very policy environment and the pattern of economic growth have put a drag on the quality of employment in India. Given this, we suggest a variety of countervailing policy options and emphasise the role of civil society and politics.

We quantify the importance of endogenous human capital and of selection effects for counterfactual analysis of social security (SS) reforms. The literature typically performs these analyses by using structural models featuring exogenous productivity profiles. However, this approach faces two issues: (i) the estimation of productivity is subject to selection bias, and (ii) productivity is endogenous to the SS reforms. In this paper, we estimate a quantitative overlapping generations model featuring endogenous human capital accumulation using US data. First, we eliminate the SS and find a large positive effect on aggregate effective labor supply (${+}10.31\%$). Next, we build variants of this model to quantify the two issues (i) and (ii). We find that the endogeneity issue (ii) is quantitatively more important than the selection bias issue (i).

The social protection of platform workers is considered one of the most precarious features and political challenges of this new form of employment. Still, there have only been a few empirical investigations on this issue to date. This article presents an explorative empirical analysis of the social protection of platform workers in Germany – a conservative welfare regime with a strong link between standard employment and institutionalised social protection. On the basis of an online survey amongst 719 self-employed platform workers, we examine how different employment patterns correspond to institutionalised protection against sickness and old age. We empirically explore different protection types and analyse how they differ regarding working conditions in platform work and individual social policy preferences. Findings reveal that conditions of platform work and social protection as well as demands and regulatory preferences vary notably across different clusters of platform workers. Still, the vast majority votes against obligatory social insurances for platform workers and favours self-employment over dependent employment. Against this background, we discuss challenges for future attempts aiming at improving social protection for platform workers. This study adds to the literature by empirically exploring platform workers’ social protection and social policy preferences, which have been overlooked to date.

Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross-country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.

Since 2010, the UK government has transformed social security administration using digital technology and automated instruments to create and deliver a single working-age benefit known as Universal Credit (UC). Social policy scholars have given much attention to the key policy tenets of UC but engaged less with leading aspects of automated and digital delivery and their relationship to different forms of administrative burdens for UC recipients. This article addresses this empirical and conceptual gap by drawing on administrative burdens literature to analyse empirical data from forty-four interviews with UC recipients. We conclude by highlighting three costs: temporal, financial, and emotional. These costs illustrate the political dimensions of technical features of UC, as they affect accountability procedures and paths to legal entitlements that have bearings on certain claimants’ rights.

Studying the transformation of France’s social security system between 1970 and 2020 reveals a recomposition of the power of unelected governmental elites. The institutionalization of a group of “welfare elites” characterized by a new sociological profile (social background and career paths) has led to a reshaping of policy governance (“Iron Triangle”). These High civil servants have carried out a program of “sustainable social welfare,” reinforcing state interventionism in health and social insurance policies. In the context of this program’s implementation, they have developed the role of custodians of state policies. This strengthening of the French state’s capacity sheds new light on the question of its reconfiguration.

Many Western countries first introduced family allowances around the Second World War. We argue that this clustering is not coincidental and put pronatalist policies related to war preparation and the socioeconomic and demographic ramifications of the Second World War at the center of our explanation. To test this, we first conduct brief case studies of France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to detail how war preparation influenced the introduction of such family allowances. Second, a panel regression of 18 Western countries investigates the different factors contributing to the timing of introduction of such policies and shows that war and its aftershocks have been an important causal factor in the introduction of family allowances. It was not so much the destructiveness of and the involvement in the war that played a role, but rather a general wartime crisis that affected belligerent and non-belligerent countries in similar ways.

Across the globe, welfare conditionality and sanctioning increasingly permeate social welfare programs. Paternalism is one of the key normative rationales invoked when both scholars and politicians debate the legitimacy of this reform. With a view to bringing the scholarly and political debates into closer conversation with each other, this paper examines how paternalism manifests in political debate. We systematically analyse the paternalist arguments made by Australian federal parliamentarians in favour of the virtually identical 2017 and 2018 policy proposals to drug test welfare recipients, both of which resulted in a stalemate. We find that paternalistic arguments primarily employed soft, weak, and welfare paternalism, with heavy emphasis on the purported benefits of the intervention, limited emphasis on the issue of personal liberty, and noticeable silence about autonomy and consent. These findings shed light on the scholarly features of paternalism that are obscured in contemporary political discourse. This analysis can direct political philosophers to features of paternalism that need more attention as well as suggest ways that drug and welfare policy advocates may engage more effectively with paternalist arguments.

The discourse on universal basic income varies widely across countries. In Sweden, public opinion is generally negative even in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is barely discussed on the public policy table. On the other hand, in South Korea, public opinion is not as negative as in Sweden, and basic income is actively raised as policy agenda. Our study based on survey results reaffirmed the contrasting attitudes of the Swedish and Suth Korean people regarding basic income and related tax increase. The basic income could appeal to the people in South Korea. On the contrary, there is little room for the introduction of basic income in Sweden. The analysis also revealed similarities within the difference. Those with high income, political-right orientation, high protection against income loss, and high tax burden would be more unfavourable toward introduction of basic income no matter which country they live in.

This introduction to our themed section on social policy responses to the recent cost-of-living crisis spells out this topic and the key issues examined in the section’s main contributions before summarising their findings and overall contribution to the literature. More specifically, to frame this themed section, the present Introduction begins with a concise, up-to-date overview of the inflationary crisis that emerged in late 2021 and evolved throughout 2022 and the first half of 2023. It then charts, and reflects upon, the diversity of responses enacted in a variety of countries reflective of different models of welfare provision in Europe and North America.

This paper compares social policy responses to the cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. In seeking to protect citizens from an inflationary shock, a series of fundamental social policy questions arise. What would the aims of support packages be? To what extent should support be universal or targeted? If targeted, did existing policy architectures facilitate or frustrate the targeting of support? As the scale and persistence of the inflationary shock became evident, smaller and near-universal responses gave way to larger support packages with a greater reliance on targeting. Social security systems played an important role in policy responses, though often by passporting one-off payments rather than a strengthening of these core programmes. Passporting led both to improved distributional outcomes vis-à-vis the more universal elements but created new administrative challenges and led to rough justice in some circumstances. The reliance on one-off payments underlined the temporary nature of policy responses.

Twenty years ago, the adjustment to monthly Social Security benefits for early or delayed claiming was, on average, roughly actuarially fair, although some subsets of individuals could gain from delay. Since then, delaying claiming has become much more attractive thanks to three factors: a more generous delayed retirement credit, improvements in mortality, and historically low real interest rates. In this article, I examine how these three factors influence optimal claiming behavior. I also discuss empirical patterns of claiming across individuals and over time, as well as explanations for these patterns. I argue that although many people appear to claim suboptimally early, this behavior may be changing as information spreads about the importance of the claiming decision. Finally, I discuss policy toward claiming and the impact that an increase in strategic claiming could have on Social Security's finances.

Former US president George W. Bush's idea of the United States as an ‘ownership society’ can be considered as the rhetorical apex of a conservative, libertarian push for a more market-driven restructuring of American social institutions. Reformers in the Bush administration particularly targeted Social Security, a popular American institution and signature achievement of the New Deal era, aiming to replace a system of solidarity with one of individual responsibility and partial privatization. Returning to the time of the early 2000s, this article analyzes the rhetoric of the ownership society as a libertarian utopian social vision - a future, more perfect community the United States should aspire to grow into. It argues that the political discourse on Social Security propagated by the Bush administration relied on rhetorical strategies characterized by an engagement of temporalities. On the one hand, ownership discourse invoked the nation's past achievements and traditional values secured during the American Revolution and guaranteed in the nation's founding documents. On the other hand, the administration framed the alleged urgency of the reforms by making projections about the future and using these to raise questions about the present system of Social Security provision. In this way, earlier debates over Social Security reform provide a valuable perspective on the contemporary nexus of finance and temporality.

Fertility, particularly at its current low level in many developed countries and high level in some less developed countries, is a key factor driving demographic, economic, and societal changes at local, national, and global levels. Population ageing due to low fertility and increasing longevity represents one of the most significant global megatrends and risks. Many countries are already experiencing population decline and rapid growth of their elderly populations, with implications for workforce size, economic development, health and pension schemes, and social security arrangements. Actuaries are well known for their work on mortality and morbidity, but they have rarely considered fertility and its proximate determinants, despite their demographic and economic effects. This paper explores key explanations and outcomes of past and projected future fertility trends, and the implications for actuaries and for political and economic decision-makers.

Passported benefits are additional benefits provided to individual or households based on a previous eligibility to a “primary” social security benefit. Although passported benefits should be easier to claim, in reality the claiming process is often cumbersome and results in low take-up. Drawing on an Israeli case study, we offer a conceptual framework to categorize and analyse the varieties of passported benefits along five dimensions: the eligibility role of primary cash benefits; automation level; legal status; type of service delivery; and the degree of decentralization. The administrative burden literature is employed to make sense of the paradox of passported benefits becoming a site for administrative burden. Using our conceptual framework and drawing on interviews with officials and claimants, we demonstrate why some passported benefits are more user-friendly while others tend to become administratively burdensome.

The US Social Security program was created in part as an explicit response to the Great Depression. We evaluate the performance of Social Security as a protective safety net against a rare episode of sudden and significant loss of private wealth such as the Great Depression. We construct a model in which a rare event causes a shock to wealth at an unknown time. How well does Social Security function as a safety net against such risk? The answer depends critically on whether households optimize in the face of this risk. If the household has full information on the distribution of rare event risk and solves a dynamic stochastic problem to hedge this risk, then Social Security is unnecessary along this dimension. Alternatively, if the household does not account for rare event risk in its financial planning, then Social Security can provide very large welfare gains as a safety net.