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This book shows that reforms in Europe and the US in the early 2000's, reflect a strengthening of the role of the Market in the governance of activation, and an individualisation of service delivery. More recent events point, however, to a shift of focus towards cuts in benefits and services.

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 theadoption 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 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.

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. 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.

China's one-child policy, as well as policies to increase fertility in east Asia, are well-known population issues. The "Population Problem" in Pacific Asia explores why fertility is so low, why China's fertility is likely to stay low, and what governments might be able to do to both improve the population situation in their countries and simultaneously better people's lives.

The concept of "social exclusion" has been widely adopted to describe the conditions of economic, social, political, and/or cultural marginalization experienced by particular groups of people due to extreme poverty, discrimination, dislocation, and disenfranchisement. Social Exclusion in Cross-National Perspective examines the impacts of social exclusion on disadvantaged populations across four countries¿China, India, South Korea, and the United States¿andprovides a rich account of the interplay between globalization and social exclusion, as well as how policies and social action respond to it.

Exacerbated by the Great Recession, youth transitions to employment and adulthood have become increasingly protracted, precarious, and differentiated by gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Examining employment transitions affected by family and migration, Youth Labor in Transition argues for an integrated analysis of the sphere of economic production and social reproduction if policy intervention is to be effective.

Decent Incomes for All sheds new light on recent poverty trends in the European Union and the corresponding responses by European welfare states. The authors analyze the effect of social and fiscal policies before, during, and after the recent economic crisis, and study the impact of alternative policy packages on poverty and inequality.

Child Welfare Removals by the State examines how child protection systems in eight modern, democratic states proceed when deciding whether to remove vulnerable children from their home. In particular, it analyzes socio-legal decision-making systems at the exact point when care is decided, including court, court-like, and voluntary removal systems.

This volume spotlights recent advances in the worldwide use of quantitative performance measures in the public sector, especially approaches that incorporate program evaluation techniques. Chapters include single-country case studies, multi-country comparisons, and thoughtful essays on the challenges of making performance measurement and management work in diverse settings.

The world is aging at a great speed. While this is a remarkable achievement, aging also brings new challenges, among them a growing need for long-term care. Caring for a Living specifically investigates Italy's employment of home eldercare assistance, an arrangement whereby long term care services are bought in the market in the form of private and individualized assistance - predominantly female immigrants.

Today, 215 million people live outside their home countries and another 700 million say they would migrate to another country if they could. This volume examines the ways both sending and receiving nations are modifying their migration policies to control entry, to encourage assimilation, and to build links between diasporas and their home countries.

Disappointing poverty trends suggest limitations to employment-centred welfare reform and downward pressures on the redistributive capacity of welfare states. Innovative empirical analyses of the links between poverty, labour market participation and social redistribution are presented. The observations are linked with a broader perspective on the socio-economic, demographic and paradigmatic evolutions in contemporary welfare states.

With contributions from the world's foremost authorities on social measurement, this volume promises to be the definitive reference for poverty researchers and policymakers seeking to disengage politics from measurement.

In both Europe and America, the landscape of social policies has undergone fundamental changes in recent decades, especially in endeavors to develop new welfare arrangements. How does this affect citizenship-at-large as defined by the Marshallian triad of personal, democratic, and social rights?

This vital book is a comparative study of the social policies and professional practices that frame societal responses to the problems of child maltreatment in ten countries.

This book systematically analyzes how much European countries and the U.S. have in common and how much variation we find within the enlarged E.U. in central spheres of socio-economic and political life.

The book examines where, why and to what extent immigrant children are represented in the child welfare system in 11 high-income countries. By comparing policies and practices in child welfare systems (and welfare states), especially in terms of how they conceptualize and deal with immigrant children and their families, we address an immensely important and pressing issue in modern societies.

Despite the fact that universities are at the centre of knowledge creation and development, which itself is seen as one of the main engines of economic growth, public funding of higher education in most countries is not increasing or at least not increasing enough in real terms. This volume explores new funding schemes and incentives introduced in many European higher education systems, including competitive funding schemes for research under the name of"excellence" policies.

This book offers a composite snapshot of Chinese social policy at its point of greatest maturation prior to the 2007 global crisis.

A landmark publication, this volume is geared for faculty and graduate students of economics, political science, social policy, and sociology, as well as policymakers concerned with increasing inequality in a period of deep economic and social crisis.

This book is about many things: development and modernization, dictatorship and democracy, state capacity and governance, social protection and welfare states, and Korean history. But finally it is about lifting social policy analysis out of the ghetto of self-sufficiency it is often confined to and into the center ground of hard political science.