Search Results

Recent congressional investigations into rising college tuition have laid the groundwork for price controls on tuition. This chapter explores the rationale for tuition controls by examining the relationship between federal policy and how colleges and universities set their tuition. Much of the public discussion is based on an argument first made by former secretary of education William Bennett in 1987. Bennett's hypothesis is that increases in federal financial aid lead to increases in college tuition. This chapter contains an alternative to the Bennett Hypothesis called the Congressional Squeeze. The Congressional Squeeze suggests that the causation is reversed. Increases in college tuition cause increases in federal financial aid. The chapter ends with a discussion of the tuition proposals in the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008. The act does not contain price controls, but there are some sanctions for colleges and universities with high tuition increases.

Most UK households do not face affordability difficulties; those most affected are typically low-income renters and aspiring first-time buyers. However, popularly-used affordability indicators look at the average household position across the country, rather than the distribution across households. Therefore, Chapter 2 discusses the strengths and weaknesses of different affordability measures, including the popular price to earnings or income ratios, the share of expenditure taken by housing and residual income methods. The chapter is critical of these measures and, therefore, proposes two new indicators that provide more information: the first examines the relationship between housing stress and expenditure shares for low-income renters; the second constructs a version of the Lorenz curve for aspiring first-time buyers and shows the proportion of houses that could be afforded by households with different levels of income around the country.

This chapter outlines recent changes in housing policy following the credit crunch after 2007, economic recession and the election of a new government in 2010. It reflects on yet another blueprint for housing within the UK welfare state since 1939. While the approach to housing adopted as part of the Beveridge welfare state was flawed, subsequent changes in housing tenure, housing standards and supply, housing costs, benefit rates and income inequality generated affordability problems and put further strain on the way that the welfare state addressed housing issues. Successive attempts to redesign housing within the welfare state were overtaken by wider developments. Against this background the chapter considers how the most recent policy iteration departs from earlier practice and is likely to leave problems in housing, to increase inequalities in household wealth and increase social and ethnic segregation and the concentration of deprivation.

The affordability of key resources such as water and energy is important to community well-being and livelihood. Yet the planning of infrastructure tends to treat affordability as an afterthought to be dealt with through subsidies or market adjustments. Fuel poverty is a key example but there is also a growing academic literature on water poverty. This chapter considers energy, water, transport and recycling infrastructure to discuss how provision can be made for lower-income groups as a fundamental element of infrastructure planning and counter-posing this to a market-model of infrastructure provision.

Affordability, accessibility, availability, and rationality of medicines are a big challenge in India. Notwithstanding the tag of 'pharmacy of the developing world', the India story is one of poverty and poor access among plenty. The pharma market in India is riven by market failures due to asymmetries of various kinds: between patients, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies. Expecting the market to regulate itself will not work and proactive state intervention is necessary in pricing and provision of medicines and health care services to deal with the extraordinary crisis of public health in India.