Estelle James – författare

This is a collection of mostly original essays about the current picture of the international non-profit sector. It deals with the consequences of institutional choice in both industrialized and less-developed countries. England, Wales Sweden, Holland, Japan, Latin America, Austria, Germany, Sri Lanka, West Africa, and Chile are included in this volume, which forms part of the Yale Studies on Non-Profit Organizations Series.

Arising as a market-induced improvement on existing governmental services and competing with the government for customers and resources, nonprofit organizations are a relatively unexplored area of public policy. This collection of essays, written by scholars from a variety of disciplines, adds new dimensions to the theory of nonprofit organizations, and describes the public policies regarding nonprofit organizations that do or should exist in both developing and developed countries. The contributors consider why governments subsidize such organizations, the problems such subsidies create, and the role played, from an international perspective, by religion and other ideological institutions in the founding and managing of nonprofit services.

As populations age and revenues diminish, government and private pension funds around the world are facing insolvency. The looming social security crisis is especially dire for women, who live longer than men but have worked less in the formal labor force. This groundbreaking study examines alternative social security systems and their disparate impacts on men and women. Emphasis is placed on the new multi-pillar systems that combine a publicly managed benefit and a mandatory private retirement saving plan. The Gender Impact of Social Security Reform compares the gendered outcomes of social security systems in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, and presents empirical findings from Eastern and Central European transition economies as well as several OECD countries. Women’s positions have improved relative to men in countries where joint pensions have been required, widows who have worked can keep the joint pension in addition to their own benefit, the public benefit has been targeted toward low earners, and women’s retirement age has been raised to equality with that of men. The Gender Impact of Social Security Reform will force economists and policy makers to reexamine the design features that enable social security systems to achieve desirable gender outcomes.