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Provides an overview of the changes in income distribution in developing and transition countries in recent decades, and assesses the incidence of taxes and government expenditure in these countries. For the overview of income distribution, the chapter relies largely on a set of newly available ‘high‐quality’ income‐distribution data. For the assessment of tax and government expenditure incidence, it relies on existing incidence studies on individual countries. The chapter has five sections: Introduction; The Role of Taxes and Social Spending; Selective Literature Survey—a survey of the studies on the incidence of taxes and expenditure, paying particular attention to the incidence of government spending on education and health, and reviewing the available evidence for a large number of developing countries; Role of Taxes and Government Social Spending Policy—this section offers an overview of the changes in income distribution in developing countries from the 1970s to the 1990s, with separate discussion of the nature of tax reforms and social expenditure policy and their distributional implications in selected countries (Hungary, Indonesia, and Thailand); and Summary and Conclusions.

This chapter discusses the key analysis and messages from the Social Policy Association (SPA) race audit, looking at the challenges facing the discipline. The report was tasked with looking at social policy in terms of student composition, staff composition, conference/journal content, and curriculum content. Social policy has treated debates on ‘race’ and racism as marginal for too long, as reflected in the relative absence of ‘race’ from the major social policy journals. An important issue that has arisen is that the SPA has never made use of ethnic monitoring in membership applications, making it impossible to assess the representativeness or otherwise of its membership. The SPA clearly has some way to go to persuade social policy academics of the importance of confronting this challenge, and this is unlikely to happen without a major cultural shift within higher education institutions (HEIs) and the discipline more broadly.

This book examines Robert Pinker's selected works on social policy and welfare pluralism, past and present. Pinker began writing on social policy in the 1960s, undertaking research work on issues such as the development of health care within the poor law. He published books devoted to social policy, including Social Theory and Social Policy (1971) and The Idea of Welfare (1979), along with various articles on complementary topics. Pinker's main concern was to rethink the study of social policy, arguing that ‘theory’ should not be confused with ideology or rhetoric. His ideas were primarily built around such themes as stigma, conditional altruism, access to land and property, giving and receiving, and migration and civil war. In Social Theory and Social Policy, Pinker highlighted the distinction in social life between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’. He also made explicit the areas of study under the heading of ‘sociology of morals’.

The profile of older adults in the Global North is changing rapidly with increasing proportions of foreign-born ageing populations. Despite their demographic significance, very little research has been conducted on the complex and varied experiences of ageing, risk, and insecurity in this group, particularly with regard to significant life course events such as migration. Using the conceptual lens of precarity, this chapter presents a nuanced analysis of risk and vulnerability in the context of ageing and migration. We begin with a brief overview of the key economic, psychosocial, and cultural markers of precarity in older immigrants. Next, we highlight the ‘politics of precarity’ inherent in the larger political economy of immigration and the invisibility of racialized older immigrants in health and social care policies. We conclude with a discussion on the challenges to understanding precarity in the context of migration, and provide suggestions for future research.

The nature of the underlying research of the selection of Impact Case Studies from the 2014 REF is being analysed and compared across disciplines. Guiding questions for the chapters are whether there is a pattern to the kind of research and researcher/s that are included in highly ranked case studies and whether this differs across the social science disciplines, e.g. comparing seniority, gender, funding and methodologies across the sub-panels.

In this chapter the nature and reach of impact is evaluated and compared across the three sub-panels based on a typology that distinguishes between the effects on policy-making (new policy invention, new direction or new ideas), on practitioners or whether the contribution is based on improved data and knowledge capture. In addition, concepts such as impact pathways and impact agents are being applied to the Impact Case studies of the 2014 REF.

There are critical times in a child's life where failure to intervene can have irreversible impacts on their capabilities and quality of life. Although protecting the rights of all children and reducing inequities in human development are acknowledged needs, strong evidence on how to do so is sparse. It is against this backdrop that the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) initiated, in 2007, the Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities. This Study now spans 50+ countries in Africa, Asia, CEE/CIS, Latin America and the Middle East. This chapter describes the progress made by this coordinated international effort to highlight the nature and extent of multidimensional child poverty, and explores concrete strategies on how national policies can address poverty and disparities. The analysis looks at why UNICEF launched this effort; what concerns, considerations and principles have shaped it; and analyses the challenges of operationalizing child poverty concepts, measures and responses across five continents. Finally, it examines what lessons this global effort can offer to the international development community and provides recommendations on the way forward.

In this chapter, Robert Pinker considers the ways in which different generations of students perceive the history of social policy as well as the different vantage points in time from which each of us look back on our own lives. Pinker first discusses some of the scholars who had influenced his approach to the study of social policy from the 1950s onwards, including Richard Titmuss, T.H. Marshall, Brian Abel-Smith, and O.R. McGregor. He then describes the academic context in which he started his career and wrote Social Theory and Social Policy and explains his interest in developing theories and models of social welfare for purposes of historical and comparative research. Pinker also talks about the variety of topics he explored in his research, such as the moral dynamics of welfare institutions.

This chapter analyses and explains Greece's official response to the EU's evolving social policy. Understanding this response requires a careful consideration of the four important factors that influence the overall Greek attitude towards the European integration project. These factors are: the country's economic underdevelopment compared to other EU countries; the late and inadequate development of social structures and the welfare state; the wide consensus among major political parties on European integration, based on the predominance of political criteria; and the underdevelopment of civil society and the ineffectiveness of public administration. Greece's reactions to EU policies and initiatives on employment and social protection in recent years were neither sufficient nor consistent nor clear. This problem is reflected by the absence of Greek responses to EU documents. Positions on EU policies are scattered and are accessible to a very closed circle of technocrats near the Prime Minister. In addition to the exclusion of highly educated public servants, Greek ministries do not always pay close attention to EU matters and Greece cannot decisively formulate national positions on European social issues, even in a general way. The Europeanisation of Greek social policy is not always a dynamic process. Although Greek social policy follows the general pace of other Member States, it does not exhibit particular enthusiasm or inspiration. Greek governments are trapped in the quest for pan-European social integration, hence they underestimated and responded unwillingly to ‘minor’ Europan social initiatives such as the open method of coordination, the Green Paper, and the Social Policy Agenda. Greece needs to adopt a more proactive approach and strengthen the managerial and planning capacities of public administration, while granting more authority to medium-level policy makers.

This section of the book presents a three-part structure focusing on developments in the welfare state, a selection of chaPTERS commissioned from the Social Policy Association (SPA) annual conference, and the issue of rescaling of social policy and the governance of challenges that presents to the welfare state. It reflects on contemporary developments in the welfare state in the light of their success or failure, in tackling Beveridge's ‘five evils’ of want, idleness, ignorance, disease and squalor. It presents an examination in a range of issues related to children in social policy for reasons that are deliberate and contingent. It provides contributions that engage with processes by which some of the functions of welfare are being reconstituted at other levels or scales. It notes that the contributions primarily address the reconstitution of welfare functions ‘below’ the level of the nation state.

Based on 16 interviews with Social Policy Professors on the impact and influence they have had (or not had) over their professional lifecourse, the chapter picks up on themes set out in chapter 2 about the feasibility of academics influencing policy-making and highlights the role of luck, (often international) collaboration, the role of mentors and a strong emphasis on epistemic communities.

This chapter deals with the appointment of Richard Titmuss, which is described as ‘social administration’. The professional association which he later co-sponsored is initially called the Social Administration Association. It notes that this has now become the Social Policy Association (SPA) and more generally today the subject is referred to as ‘social policy’ rather than ‘social administration’. It observes that Titmuss's lecture to the new association dismisses an interpretation of administration as the narrow concern with management and technical planning; and his own work encompasses concern with theory and politics as well as organisation and process. It further adds that another current controversy is the extent to which social policy constitutes an academic discipline rather than (merely) a field of study.

Key themes coming out from the book are that there still seems to be a role for the academic as the expert on a topic over their role as producer of specific pieces or, even, programmes of research, both normative and technical. However, the most successful impact case studies in terms of submitting units are mainly from established universities and academics, frequently submitted by (male) lone scholars and void of national and international or interdisciplinary collaborations in the case studies. Finally, it is important to distinguish between impact agents and impact beneficiaries when assessing 2014 REF impact Case Studies in terms of their contribution to society. Impact agents are those able to make changes be it policy-makers or professionals. Impact beneficiaries are those whose lives are improved as a result of the changes, e.g. children in poverty, the elderly in need of care, prospective pensioners and voters. Therefore, it is not an overstatement to say that the contribution of academics as captured by the impact submissions analysed here has improved the lives of many people in the UK and around the world.