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The original purpose of Japan's Fiscal Investment Loan Programme (FILP) was to contribute to fixed capital formation by allocating funds to dedicated functional organizations at the national, regional, and local levels to enable them to provide finance for capital investment and loans for mainly three types of public sector projects. The first of those was for projects where loan periods were too long for private-sector institutions to bear the interest-rate risk. Second, FILP finance was intended to finance those projects whose potential profitability was too uncertain for private-sector institutions to bear the risk. The third main type was projects where low-interest loans were offered for purposes of income redistribution, and the interest rates were too low to be handled by private-sector financial institutions. While few inside Japan advocated the outright abolition of FILP, the need to redefine its purpose, scope, and operational criteria became urgent as tensions arose in the system. This chapter discusses the background to the reform process initiated for FILP in 1997 and examines the principles of ‘New FILP’ introduced in April 2001.

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 the development stage of the relationship between the IMF and World Bank, when the work of both converged on lending in developing countries. The primary exogenous shock came from the end of the Vietnam War and balance-of-payments deficits, culminating with the end of fixed parity in the IMF. Considerable endogenous change also occurred, chiefly from the “sunshine laws” that opened an array of government activities to public scrutiny. The chapter argues that this combination facilitated new forms of congressional advocacy toward the Bretton Woods institutions because more information on their activities became available as public interest advocacy expanded across American politics. Using amendments to authorization and appropriations bills, groups sought to direct lending of the World Bank, in particular, by earmarks on funds away from countries accused of human rights abuses. Other amendments sought to prevent American participation in the Witteveen Facility and created the Gold Commission. Also during this stage, Congress asserted itself vis-à-vis the executive branch, through extensive negotiations connected to the creation of gold sales to finance the IMF Trust Fund and the Jamaica Accord. While many of the efforts were unsuccessful, they secured future channels of political influence.

This chapter proposes a “social savings” approach that would break the continuing “cycle of poverty” among children. This is essentially the same approach that was used to end poverty among the elderly. In 2003, Britain implemented a Child Trust Fund that uses this approach. No doubt the Child Future Savings Account proposal has limitations, but it suggests the kinds of strategies, within a broader structural understanding of child welfare, that might solve the problems children face. Ending child poverty will take more than providing immediate relief of hardship. Long-term solutions designed to break the cycle of poverty are required.

This chapter examines the Czech Refugee Trust Fund (CRTF), originally set up by the British government after the Munich Agreement as the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia in October 1938. Many of those who came to England under its auspices were German/Austrian refugees who had taken refuge in Czechoslovakia and were now fleeing for the second time; many of these were political refugees. It was largely because of suspected Communists within the CRTF, as well as British Communists on the staff of the organisation such as Yvonne Kapp, that MI5 considered it ‘about the most dangerous of all these organisations’. It employed numerous informants to spy on its activities and personalities. This chapter draws on the organisational files MI5 kept on the CRTF as well as on personal files kept on individual members.

This chapter explores Article XXVII of the Colorado Constitution, titled “Great Outdoors Colorado.” The article was added in 1992 to earmark all state lottery proceeds for wildlife, parks, and outdoor recreation. It was adopted in reaction to legislative allocations of lottery proceeds to other purposes. Section 1 established and defined the program. Section 2 created the Great Outdoors Trust Fund with detailed rules for its revenues. Section 3 allocates lottery proceeds among the Trust Fund, the Division of Parks and Recreation, and the Conservation Trust Fund. Section 5(1) vests exclusive control of the Trust Fund in the State Board of the Great Outdoors Colorado Trust Fund, established and defined by Section 6.

Highway users face chronic congestion, rough roads, and deficient bridges. This chapter provides a capsule history of U.S. highway funding and management. It compares highways with other vital public utilities and suggests that the public utility model would be more effective in dealing with highways’ systemic problems.

19^th-century highways were mostly private turnpikes. The “good roads” movement led to some early 20^th-century federal funding. Tolls were used mostly by public toll authorities. The 1956 Interstate Highways legislation greatly increased the federal role in funding and regulation.

Throughout the legislative odyssey of federal policy on comparative effectiveness research from 2002 to 2008, the specifics of the policy took many different forms. While opponents to federally-mandated comparative effectiveness research objected to the policy entirely, proponents of the policy were divided as to where the function should be housed (inside the federal government or outside); how it should be financed (congressional appropriations or fees levied on public and private health insurers and health plans), and how it should be governed (how much representation should each stakeholder have on a governing board). Every specification has its advantages and disadvantages. The two federal mandates currently in force for comparative effectiveness research—the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and the 2010 Affordable Care Act—differ markedly in placement, financing, governance, research priority-setting methods, and processes, illustrating the fact that every alternative is a balance between advantages and disadvantages.

This chapter outlines gender justice actors’ imprint on the Rome Statute’s restorative justice provisions and the implementation and interpretation of these formal rules in practice. It draws on Nancy Fraser’s concept of redistribution, and the importance of economic structural transformation for combating conflict-related sexual violence. In the initial period of International Criminal Court operations, there have been some positive steps toward achieving gender justice redistribution. This is particularly true in the implementation of the Trust Fund for Victims’ assistance mandate. However, the ongoing influence of gender legacies, reflected through the cascade effect of failures to successfully prosecute sexual and gender-based crimes, has been a major impediment to achieving redistributive gender justice outcomes in the Court’s first decade in operation.

Ida Pope’s first-hand account of the years that brought her pupils into womanhood during the loss of their kingdom tells an important story about the Hawaiians and a rapidly changing world. Pope fought vigorously for her pupils and alumnae as she saw them struggling under the weight of conflicting expectations imposed on them by the swiftly changing economy. To that end, she worked relentlessly to provide opportunities that would help her young women advance in their society. Pope devised a unique plan, establishing three different options for her graduates; the Honor and Trust Fund, the Kamehameha Alumnae Loan Fund and Relief Fund. Her alumnae could now cover their teacher and/or nursing training in higher education and pay back the money once they were working. History reveals the success of these funds. To keep close tabs on her graduates, Pope developed an alumnae association and constitutionally aligned it with the progressive General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC). Founded in 1890, the nonpartisan, nondenominational organization was dedicated to empowering women. In Pope’s forty-eighth year of life, one of her alumna gave her a child to raise. Gladys was given in the hānai tradition to Ida May Pope at age four. Gladys Brandt grew up to be a fierce defender of Hawaiian traditions, and the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation recognized her as a “living treasure.”

This book demonstrates how collaborative research can be made more centrally part of the effort by social work and related fields to change society for the better. Drawing on the experiences of social work researchers involved in the creation of the Philadelphia Housing Trust Fund, it offers a firsthand account that shows how research and advocacy can be combined to produce social change. The book argues that social workers who collaborate with community partners can conduct credible research while empowering their clients and community partners to obtain the social changes they seek. Participatory action research and the less inclusive but more recently popular community-based participatory research can take many forms but always involve working in partnership with community representatives to conduct research. Collaboration with advocates helps inform researchers' efforts to address concerns that confront communities.

Chapter 11 evaluate the literature and policy studies and resulting proposals, including one from the former Deputy Commissioner for Disability Policy Marc Warshawsky, to alter the SSA disability standard. It analyzes transformations and trends in the twenty-first century low-skill labor market and the policy literature animating the political call for restrictive social security “reform.”

This chapter examines policy agendas associated with financial inclusion. There are many possible agendas associated with financial inclusion, but the chapter looks at savings as this has been the site of some of the most innovative financial inclusion policies, such as asset-based welfare and the automatic enrolment of people into savings products. 'Asset-based welfare' encourages the individual ownership of assets such as savings, pensions and property. This resulted in policies such as the Child Trust Fund (CTF) and Help to Save in the UK, and the Individual Development Account (IDA) initiative in the United States. Critics suggest that these policies are ultimately aimed at turning people into investor-subjects and are used to replace the welfare state. However, the chapter argues that such policies might also be used to tackle poverty and to support citizenship. Much depends on how such policies are designed. The chapter then considers different ways of adapting asset-based policies, as well as steps such as 'progressive universalism' within the CTF and the relevance of tackling gender inequality within the automatic enrolment of a workplace pension.

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.

Warshawsky and Marchand have also argued that their proposal is necessitated by budgetary concerns around the depletion of the social security trust fund, the social undesirability of high and increasing disability benefits utilization or prevalence, the standard’s lack of strictness and elasticity, excessively subjective and increasingly claimant-slanted ALJ decision-making, and fraud.These claims reflect a common thread in a variety of disability “reform” proposals seeking benefit reductions and either substantive standard restrictions or removal of various procedural protections for claimants. Apart from the issue discussed above—the propriety of addressing budgetary concerns through the collateral and non-transparent device of standard revisions that disproportionately place the burden of budgetary reform on the most vocationally disadvantaged and socio-economically challenged subgroups of claimants—the validity of these budgetary assertions are questionable and discussed below.

This chapter offers reflections of EAC Appeals Judge Ouagadeye Wafi, who discusses producing the highly anticipated appeals decision. Specifically, he comments on the challenge of ruling on multiple procedural challenges raised by the defence, as well as the reasoning behind maintaining the conviction in its entirety save for acquitting Hissène Habré of personally raping Khadidja Hassan Zidane. In hindsight, the main challenge presented by the appeal was to satisfactorily deal with the recognition of the civil parties and the question of compensation with only twenty-eight working weeks to do so. Although Judge Wafi did not observe any political influence or pressure, he feels that the time limit, albeit understandable and intrinsically linked to the budget, served to hinder the work of justice, which in itself should not be so strictly regulated. As a result, the Appeals Court was forced to encumber the Trust Fund for Victims with tasks that it could have undertaken itself had it had the necessary human, financial, and time resources. Particularly in terms of eligibility, this would have allowed the victims to definitely be in the know at the time of the verdict was announced, and which would also have prevented new actors from the need to delve into such a sprawling file, saving precious time.