International Policy Exchange – serie

Over the past 75 years, household income in the United States has increased substantially. Still, by some measures, income inequality has increased as well. This has been the subject of contested public policy and political discourse. The question still stands: How can we better articulate the nuanced changes in American incomes? It is difficult to have conversations about income inequality without an agreed-upon set of terms, metrics, and concepts. United States Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality, edited by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, examines the trends in income growth in the United States and explores various measures of income, including market, post-tax, and post-transfer income. Within each chapter, distinguished experts explain how income and wealth--and the way we measure them--have changed in the United States, which demographic groups have benefited from these changes, and how mobility has changed over time and over generations. Specific chapters explain the roles of gender and race. The resulting book is relevant to modern international policy, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and addresses what can be done to increase economic mobility in the United States.

European integration is focused on improving economic performance and increasing income levels in nations across the European Union. Political leaders and the media often use income trends to measure this progress, with inequality moving more and more to the forefront of these conversations. In this book, contributing authors focus on the economies within the EU, its member countries, and other European countries closely associated with the EU. The book includes an overview of economic and social trends, using long-term processes of European integration as a way to frame the discussions. Georg Fischer, Robert Strauss, and their contributors focus on explaining how policy makers and the media focus on national trends to measure progress among the nations in Europe. They make a specific point to look at the EU as an economic and political entity whose parts are closely interlinked rather than as a conglomerate of individual countries. The contributors consider the commonalities and differences between various institutions and policies, explaining how a decision in one country might impact another. Europe's Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality offers a novel approach to the analysis of social and economic trends, and the resulting book identifies major policy challenges applicable in the EU and beyond.

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policy-makers' main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented social investment policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. The World Politics of Social Investment: Welfare States in the 21st Century is the first of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume develops a theory on the political and socio-economic conditions for the development of social investment policies around the globe, and studies the impact of the main explanatory factors on the empirical variety of social investment reforms (and non-social investment reforms). It also proposes a new typology of different welfare reform strategies, distinguishing nine types of social investment strategies depending on their functions (creating, mobilizing and preserving human skill and capabilities) and their distributive profiles (inclusive, stratified or targeted), and three types of non-social investment welfare strategies (market liberalism, social protectionism and basic income). The chapters of this volume are written by leading social policy scholars from different disciplines and countries, who apply the WOPSI global theoretical framework in a range of contexts and policy fields, shedding light on the scope conditions of social investment, as well as political demand- and supply-side drivers of social investment reforms. This volume on its own or in conjunction with the second volume is an invaluable resource on the state of modern welfare and social investment policies from around the globe.

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policy-makers' main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented social investment policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. The World Politics of Social Investment: Political Dynamics of Reform is the second of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume traces the development of social investment reforms across the regions of Nordic, Continental, and Southern Europe, as well as Central and Eastern Europe, North and Latin America, and North East Asia. The chapters in this volume study the impact of different structural drivers for social investment (e.g., demographic, poverty, demand for skill, or lack of an available workforce), the salience of social investment in the public debates, and the different political coalitions that led to or prevented the adoption of social investment strategies. The chapters are written by leading social policy scholars from different world regions. They all apply a joint theoretical framework (developed in the first of the two volumes) to explain the politics of social investment in a range of contexts and policy fields. Jointly with the first volume, the WOPSI project offers the first worldwide analysis of social investment reforms around the globe.

The birth and remarkable expansion of Korean social welfare policy over the last several decades has taken place amidst the socio-economic burdens of a rapidly aging society. This book surveys these developments through the analytic lens of the Social Investment State, under which contemporary policies have altered the essential character of the 20th century welfare states, which had provided a counterforce to capitalism. In contrast, the Social Investment State is seen as backing policies designed to advance capitalism by promoting labor force participation, the growth of human capital, individual responsibility and economic development. In examining the modern context and development of the Korean welfare state, this book is divided into three sections that focus on the socio-political evolution, the core policies of the Korean welfare state, and the contemporary policy challenges of Korea's aging society. The first section traces the socio-political evolution of the Korean welfare state over the last three decades. The second section surveys the core policies of the Korean welfare state. The third section explores several key policy challenges encountered by the Korean approach to social investment as it seeks to address the demands of social protection in a rapidly aging society. The volume concludes with a postscript that reviews the contemporary Korean discourse, which goes beyond the social investment state to the political interests in a universal basic income policy.

Privatization of education has become a prevalent global trend, representing a significant shift from viewing education as a public good to considering it as a private commodity. This transformation is closely tied to the modernization of the state under the principles of neoliberalism. A comprehensive analysis, as presented in this book using Ball and Youdell's framework, sheds light on the diverse patterns of privatization in education, categorizing them into two types: exogenous and endogenous. The term "exogenous" refers to policies that grant the private sector increased rights and authority to deliver education services. On the other hand, "endogenous" pertains to policies aimed at making public schools operate more like businesses. This paradigm shift encompasses various elements, including parental school choice, inter-school competition, accountability to parents, and increased autonomy for schools. Still, the book shows that advantages of education privatization are evident, such as heightened efficiency and the ability to cater to the diverse needs of the public schooling system. However, it is crucial to recognize that these benefits come with an inadequately addressed trade-off between efficiency and equity or inclusion. This trade-off stands as the most pressing contemporary challenge of education privatization, affecting various contexts and cases explored within the book.Prominent researchers in the field present a multi-faceted view of the forms and consequences of education privatization. Privatization in and of Public Education encompasses a wide range of countries and regions, including both developed and developing nations, offering valuable case studies that illustrate how privatization is unfolding across the globe. By examining the driving factors behind education privatization, such as economic, political, and social influences, the authors provide a comprehensive understanding of this global phenomenon.

This book serves as a comprehensive reference for conducting political analyses of emerging welfare systems in the Global South. These countries have adopted a development-oriented approach, distinct from the social policy trajectory observed in industrialized capitalist states. However, the pervasive influence of globalization since the 1990s has significantly reshaped policy priorities in these regions. Notably, political discourse surrounding social policy concepts developed in the Northern capitalist states has gained prominence.Irrespective of the geographical focus of the chapters, the book delves into fundamental social policy concepts and debates. These include the ongoing discourse between "universalism" and "selectivity," the challenges posed by the welfare residuum, the intricate role of institutional norms and apparatuses in achieving justice or engendering feelings of shame among social assistance recipients, and the examination of "absolute" and "relative" poverty. Additionally, the book investigates the pendulum shift within social welfare policies, the complex politics surrounding the portrayal of welfare recipients, and the newly established link between poverty and shame.Comprising 12 chapters, the book employs a case study-based approach to test the applicability and universality of social policy theories and concepts. The central focus lies in assessing the adaptability of concepts and theories developed in the Global North to comprehend the intricacies of welfare politics in the Global South. These case studies contribute to theoretical generalizations capable of explaining universal principles that are relevant to both the Global South and North.

Beyond Market Meritocracy investigates how employers evaluate and treat male and female employees with varied family care responsibilities in three different labor regimes of Chinese societies - the neo-liberal Hong Kong market under a productivist welfare system, the market-driven private sector of mainland China struggling with the post-COVID-19 economic decline, and the state-supervised public sector of mainland China with socialist legacies. Through extensive and empirical data, it uniquely enriches the existing literature by examining the rationales of employers in the comparisons of different types of family caregivers and non-caregivers and of different labor regimes in China.While previous studies on family caregivers' dilemmas in the labor market often focus on the incompatibility of family care duties with the capitalist market meritocracy, this book identifies four schemes of rationales among employers in the three labor regimes of China: a market meritocracy of competence, competitiveness, and efficiency; a moral virtuocracy of family care and responsibilities; a cultural schema of gendered division of labor; and structural resources and constraints embedded in labor protection and family welfare policies. The four schemes sometimes corroborate but sometimes contradict one another in different employment contexts, based on which employers construct their evaluations of family caregivers in the labor market. The multiplicity of employers' rationales demonstrates how their attitudes and practices go beyond merely calculating the market merits of family caregivers, and sheds new light on the complexity in the relationships between workplace organization and labor rights and future directions for work and family policy programs.

Evidence-Based Policy Analysis investigates the insights learned from case studies of evidence-based policy evaluation and the policymaking process across the five distinct policy domains, representing a pioneering effort within this sphere of research. Several chapters use Korea's experience as the focus of analysis, for example, on responses to a rapidly aging population along with its low and declining birth rates while taking care that the lessons drawn are applicable to many other emerging nations, especially those in Asia, as they develop sets of policies to address similar issues in their own particular contexts. The book features eminent scholars addressing critical domestic issues through an international and comparative lens focused on a major Asian society, offering lessons for other similar societies and nations.

Education remains one of the biggest challenges for Latin American societies. However, the factors explaining this are hardly known, less so thoroughly understood. In Skills, Values, and Development: The Political Economy of Education in Latin America, the authors approach the education problem in 21st-century Latin America by considering it as a political economy issue. This political economy approach allows refocusing research from the supply of education (educational outcomes, institutions, and reform trajectories) in existing scholarship on policy reforms, to the conflicting demands of education by different actors at the intersection of political and economic dynamics.The book is divided into three sections: first, the authors examine how education expansion--or the lack of it--relates to common regional political trends, how these trends relate to skills, value-orientations, and developmental goals, and the conflictual dynamics between these goals. The second section of the book explores some of these issues from a historical perspective, while the final section discusses the political economy of investing in skills in the context of the region's attempts to successfully integrate itself into the knowledge economy and build more cohesive and prosperous societies. The book combines a variety of approaches and methodologies, including short and long-term perspectives, large N quantitative analyses, comparative methods, and country case studies.