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Mandatory old-age benefit programs tend to require periodic adjustments as a result of demographic and economic shocks. However, such discretionary adjustments create political risk for workers and beneficiaries, and raises taxpayer risk. An alternative way to handle such shocks is to use rule-based adjustment, which can be adopted in an unfunded system without incurring transition costs and without increasing public debt. This chapter explores an approach to this problem that would endow the Social Security Trust Fund with property rights over the revenue of a (much reduced) residual payroll tax paid by future workers. This revenue would be securitized and the resulting securities priced in financial markets. The new securities created in the process would allow beneficiaries to obtain safe real pensions protected from investment risk.

This chapter examines EU law and policy in the field of employment and considers the extent to which they reflect the objectives of combating racism and promoting ethnic equality. It examines EU employment legislation, such as that on worker participation. In the policy sphere, it looks at the European Employment Strategy and the European Social Fund. It concludes that issues of racism find their way onto the agenda with more ease in new governance processes; however, their fluidity means that the issue can subsequently fall off the agenda at a later stage.

This chapter explains the success of companies such as Provident Financial and Cattles (both members of the FTSE 250 by the 1990s). Their agents serviced the growing sub-prime sector and commercialized backstreet feminized affectual relationships between borrowers and lenders. The extent to which their success was dependent on the decline of pawnbroking and mail order agency (and the limitations of the government's Social Fund) is explained. The motivations and limited options of moneylenders' customers are explored as are accusations of ‘predatory lending’ and exploitation. Moneylenders fought PR battles to exclude themselves from the label ‘loan shark’, as images of criminal moneylenders increasingly replaced ones of ‘Shylocks’. The chapter examines the role of violent loan sharks, explaining their small but significant market. Particularly important was the fact that government resisted calls for interest rate caps because it feared legal lenders would abandon their riskiest borrowers, leaving them vulnerable to loan sharks.

This chapter analyses the various instruments that shape and regulate public services in Europe, with a particular focus on those instruments affecting social public services and employment services. It is suggested that public services, and employment services in particular, are placed in the midst of an extremely complex regulatory web composed by both traditional, hard law, instruments and by more reflexive and soft forms of regulation, ranging from policy Guidelines elaborated within the OMC framework, to funding arrangements provided by the European Social Fund. Crucially, this regulatory web is both woven at a supranational level and at a national and, sometimes, sub-national level and is inspired by both social and economic concerns. A visible trend is the growing role played by private and contractual modes of regulation, most obviously in the relationship between public services, private contractors/providers, and individual users.

This chapter analyzes the expansion of welfare services after the Fourth Republic collapsed in 1958 and De Gaulle implemented a two-pronged solution to the Algerian war. Alongside the expansion of military and police operations—which resulted in intense bloodshed—the Fifth Republic emphasized its benevolent development project to save French Algeria. By examining the Constantine Plan in Algeria and the Social Action Fund in the metropole, chapter 5 assesses the politics of services in France and Algeria during the final years of the war. Welfare providers’ actions defied simple characterization; some participated directly in state-sponsored violence while others became eloquent and persistent critics of repression. Yet, even the ardent critics continued to fashion themselves as Algerians’ guardians and believed Algerian nationalism impeded Algerians’ inclusion in French society.

Chapter 6 examines housing policy for Algerians at the end of the war. First, it analyzes the 1959 decision to “liquidate” the bidonvilles. Clearing these shantytowns required a massive investment in family housing between 1959 and 1962, much of which came from the Social Action Fund. Even though worker-housing construction continued, family housing provided a more visible demonstration of the state’s commitment to help Algerians and its effort to shape and monitor Algerians’ behavior. Housing families became a two-step process. First, ‘un-evolved’ families received training in transitional housing projects—mobile home parks where families received gender appropriate educational preparation for life in France. If women responded well to the transformation, social workers decided they could live in HLMs. Yet, few families moved into HLMs even though the welfare network built dozens of complexes. Instead, metropolitans and escaping French colonists moved into apartments earmarked for Algerians.

This chapter examines the provision of credit to people on low incomes from the perspective of both the borrower and the lender. It then goes on to explore the size and nature of the potential market for more affordable credit and considers the options for delivering affordable credit to those who most need it. The chapter argues that whatever shape it takes, some intervention is required to ensure that poor people have access to affordable credit. Left to its own devices, the commercial market will continue to move towards more profitable customers and away from lending to the poorest people. The biggest, most immediate impact would come from a system of guaranteed automated payments and further expansion of the discretionary Social Fund. This would require substantial investment, which could be met through public–private partnership.

This chapter examines the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) as a potential instrument of Chinese economic statecraft. More specifically, it considers the factors that make the NSSF unlikely to be a source of strategic concern by focusing on its institutional and structural characteristics as well as its investment activities. The chapter begins with a historical overview of the NSSF, followed by a discussion of the NSSF's financing sources and uses. It then reviews the NSSF's mandate and activities before evaluating how the theory applies to the case of the NSSF. It suggests that the NSSF has little potential as an effective tool of China's economic statecraft owing to its institutional structure.

This chapter discusses Chile's Social and Economic Stabilization Fund, which provides a hedge against the volatility of copper prices. Mining (copper) accounts for 15 percent of the country's GDP, and it has been as high as 25 percent of GDP during the 1920s. It represents between 40 percent and 50 percent of Chilean exports, and represents 15 percent of fiscal revenues. The Chilean Social and Economic Stabilization Fund serves as a buffer to counteract fiscal deficits, especially during situations of financial distress. Chile has a clear objective for that fund, and sticks with it. Any withdrawal from the fund must go through Congress. Two inputs are involved in the spending calculation: long-term growth perspective and the long-term copper price.

This chapter describes the development of the European political economy since the 1957 Rome treaty. It uses econometric and historical case evidence to build the argument that European integration has advanced both from the top down and from the bottom up. The first part presents several measures of European integration to address the question of how we know integration when we see it. The second part describes two mechanisms of integration: redistribution from the top down via the European Social Fund, and integration from the bottom up through the formation of the Euro-Regions. The third part describes the development of a convergent European economy, where macroeconomic differences have been reduced through European integration, especially before the 1980s, and especially if economies are weighted by their populations.

This chapter discusses the significant barriers that prevent the widespread adoption of many of the new philanthropic forms and explores how government policy might help in overcoming them. These barriers include the ambiguity or discouragement embodied in the rules governing the new forms of philanthropy, the limited availability of investment capital, significant imperfections in the markets for social-purpose investment, and the limited supply of skills and experience required to execute many of the new forms of philanthropy. Much of the policy that shapes philanthropic organizations today emerged in response to “new frontiers” of an earlier time. This chapter identifies ways in which government policy needs to change in order to allow the new frontiers of philanthropy to flourish.

Chapter 2 discusses the characteristics of and the relationship between European and local social and employment policies. It starts with an overview on EU cohesion policy and characterises the ESF as a specific governance tool which nowadays combines financial, programmatic and procedural aspects in a unique manner. In a second step, the chapter discusses the crucial role of the local level in current activation policies. Chapter 2 argues that the local level deserves specific attention and should not be subsumed under national welfare systems. Furthermore, the streamlined EU cohesion policy and particularly the ESF establish a stronger direct link between the European and the local level and confront local actors with new opportunities and challenges.

Article 148 EC The European Parliament and the Council, acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and after consulting the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, shall adopt implementing regulations relating to the European Social Fund.

Chapter 3 draws on the perspective towards the local level developed in chapter 2 and discusses how local responses to EU policies tools can be grasped conceptually. By building particularly on the political-science Europeanisation literature and on sociological field approaches, a specific bottom-up perspective will be presented which puts analytical emphasis on the local contextual conditions. The main argument is that local contexts shape the way how actors respond to the ESF as a financial opportunity, and how this shapes local labour market policies. The Europeanisation literature and the field approach provide the background for the development of conditional hypotheses to be tested empirically in later chapters.

Chapter 6 unravels the contextual conditions enabling the three different response-patterns – 1) no usage, no change. 2) usage without change, and 3) usage and change – described in the previous chapter. The chapter presents in a fist step the results of formal QCA-analyses, which reveal a number of relevant conditions both for usage (e.g. administrative capacity or political stability), and for change (e.g. cognitive engagement or public support structures). The results are then summarised in a preliminary typology of local responses to the ESF, describing specific contextual settings for each of the three patterns.

Chapter 7 takes up the formal results from chapter 6 on the contextual settings behind the three response-patterns and discusses them in light of case-knowledge. Here, more in-depth insights on the contextual conditions illustrate on the basis of the empirical material how the different conjunctions of conditions unearthed in chapter 6 work in practice. For instance, it is shown how local actors in some cases perceive the ESF as a burden due to high co-financing and administrative overload, how in other local cases actors are attracted by the conceptual freedom of the funding, or how usage of the ESF becomes normalised in the context of public interventions in some cases. Chapter 7 uses the insights from the case studies to unravel the broader empirical pictures behind the contextual settings of the three response-patterns.

This chapter discusses the revision of the Civil Code and the NPO Law after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011. It will be consider that the systemic revisions pertaining to NPOs that have been implemented since 2008. Under the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government, which was in power from September 2009 to December 2012, expected non-profit organisations (NPOs) to play a public role, such as being the supplier of public services and disaster relief, as symbolised by its the ‘New Public Commons’ slogan. Support for job creation through reconstruction support is known as Social Enterprise Support Fund. According to the survey for public policy graduate schools, it has become apparent that, there are only a small number of NPO-related subjects in the research courses. To develop a civil society in Japan, the importance of education in order to increase the level of awareness for NPOs will be pointed out.

Chapter 12 includes examination of the validity and soundness of assumptions about the Social Security Disability Insurance Trust Fund’s insolvency or solvency; the prevalence of disability benefit receipt and upward or downward trends in program participation and applications; the strictness or leniency or the program’s disability standard based on domestic considerations and relative global comparisons; the impartiality or racial bias of the administrative law judges who adjudicate disability claims at administrative evidentiary hearings; and the frequency or rarity of fraud.

Article 146 EC In order to improve employment opportunities for workers in the internal market and to contribute thereby to raising the standard of living, a European Social Fund is hereby established in accordance with the provisions set out below; it shall aim to render the employment of workers easier and to increase their geographical and occupational mobility within the Union, and to facilitate their adaptation to industrial changes and to changes in production systems, in particular through vocational training and retraining.