Comparing Welfare Service Delivery Among Public,Nonprofit and For-Profit Work Agencies

Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, there has been a proliferation of contracting for welfare services, specifically around Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and related benefits and services such as child care. The services most commonly contracted include those around the work or employment function, such as training, education, job placement, and support services to promote job entry or retention.

The purpose of this article is to examine differences in the quality of service provision among public, nonprofit, and for-profit auspices in the delivery of work-based welfare reform services. The findings show that there are some differences in welfare programs across the three sectors. The significance of this issue relates to the critical question of whether social needs can be best met through competitive outsourcing.     

New Hispanic Migration and HIV Risk in New York

Abstract

This paper reports on research designed to assess access to care by Latino immigrant populations in the New York area. A qualitative approach and methods were employed, involving focus groups with PWAs and affected men and women from Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Central America to explore the perceptions, beliefs, experience and knowledge of HIV care issues and the issues affecting health-seeking behavior. Among the data collected to provide context, depth and detail to the issue of access and utilization of services, was the detailed information on migration and HIV risk reported here.

A total of 57 men and women participated, ranging in age from 19-61. Results included information on migration patterns, obstacles for Latino immigrants living in the U.S., social networks, community resources, knowledge of HIV/AIDS, risk behavior and access to information. Data support the conclusion that to be effective in reaching and providing services to these immigrant groups, it is crucial to understand the environment from which they come and the impact of immigration. Poverty; repressive governments; lack of education/literacy; ethnicity, class; color-based stigma; and cultural norms are crucial factors in determining their attitudes, motivations, decisions and behavior. The key elements for the provision of services to this population appear to be those which build on cultural norms and which network human and institutional resources.     

Control versus consent in long-term care case management programs: implications for public policy

Case management programs for long-term care include the dual public policy goals of providing access to services and ensuring the efficient and effective application of public funds. We will use a paradigm for social policy development that proposes a conflict between control and consent motives of social policy makers. Illustrations of the limitations and positive elements of control versus consent as applied to case management will be presented.

We will discuss how the tension between these approaches can be used to develop policy that balances the goals of access and cost-effectiveness.     

The effects of family planning effort and development on fertility: An intervening variables framework

To pinpoint the intervening variable that transmit the impacts of development and family planning effort on fertility, a modified proximate determinants model was applied to data from 59 developing countries. The intermediate variable included level of exposure to sexual intercourse (the percentage of women 20-24 years old in a union), deliberate marital fertility control (the percentage of married women of reproductive age who were using contraception), and natural marital fertility (operationalized as average per capita calorie consumption). The regression equations indicated that both social development and family planning effort can influence fertility levels substantially through their association with higher levels of contraceptive use. Interestingly, the direct effects of family planning and social development on the crude birth rate became insignificant when the intermediate variables were included in the same equation. Path analysis revealed that social development has an indirect effect of -0.083 via its influence on marriage patterns and of -0.316 due to its effect on contraceptive usage. Family planning has a lesser indirect impact on fertility (-0.487), and -0.111 of this effect reflects program effort's dependence on the level of social development. Economic development is positively linked to fertility, and future research should assess whether this factor is partially counterbalancing the fertility-reducing impact of social development and family planning programs. Although this analysis confirms that delayed marriage and widespread adoption of contraception are key intervening variables, they cannot influence fertility in societies where there are social or cultural impediments to such changes.     

Partisan Activism and Access to Welfare in Lebanon

How do welfare regimes function when state institutions are weak and ethnic or sectarian groups control access to basic services? This paper explores how people gain access to basic services in Lebanon, where sectarian political parties from all major religious communities are key providers of social assistance and services. Based on analyses of an original national survey (n?=?1,911) as well as in-depth interviews with providers and other elites (n?=?175) and beneficiaries of social programs (n?=?135), I make two main empirical claims in the paper. First, political activism and a demonstrated commitment to a party are associated with access to social assistance; and second, higher levels of political activism may facilitate access to higher levels or quantities of aid, including food baskets and financial assistance for medical and educational costs. These arguments highlight how politics can mediate access to social assistance in direct ways and add new dimensions to scholarly debates about clientelism by focusing on contexts with politicized religious identities and by problematizing the actual goods and services exchanged.     

Policy guidelines for collective bargaining and family planning

The benfits of establishing family planning through collective bargaining to both labor and management are discussed. Until workers can be convinced that their children will receive health care, education and employment, and that they will be economically secure in old age, it is difficult to convince them of the many benefits of child spacing and small family size. In 1953, it was calculated by management in a Japanese steel factory that about 70% of all acidents could be attributable to difficulties in the private lives of employees. In order to ease problems in the home, collective agreements were initiated by management in the Nippon Express Company to provide family planning services. Labor agreed as long as the workers were to share in the economic awards which came from participation. Costs of implementing the family planning programs were fully offset by the decrease in expenditure on family allowances, confinement, nursing, and so on. In India some ten estates began a program in which a certain amount of money is paid into an account for every month that a woman does not become pregnant. If the woman becomes pregnant, she forfeits a substantial amount of the fund. This money comes directly from the funds which would normally have to be set aside to provide for maternity and child support programs. Certain guidelines are presented in the paper to outline the areas of responsibility of labor and management in the provision of family planning services. Among the many possibilities mentioned is the idea that both labor and management could look into the conceivability of plowing back a portion of whatever savings are accrued by management into a pension scheme to compensate workers for the loss of labor caused by having fewer children than were previously anticipated.     

Gaining Access to Public Services and the Democratic State in India: Institutions in the Middle

How and to what extent do different citizens experience democratic governance on a day-to-day basis? What agencies do they utilize in order to have their voices heard and grievances addressed? How do they gain access to government agencies responsible for delivering social welfare services, such as education, security, health care, and poverty relief? Investigations conducted in two states of India inquired about the manner in which different social groups living in rural areas gain access to the welfare services of the Indian state. These results show that an intermediary is required for gaining access. Different types of intermediaries are consulted by separate segments of society. For a large majority of poorer individuals, a newly arisen type of mediator, the naya neta (literally, new leader), is the intermediary of choice. Neither usually low status nor high status, but younger and better educated than other types of village leaders, naya netas play important roles in shaping welfare consequences in these villages of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, most importantly, by affecting equity of access.     

Financing the health care of the aged.

The Medicare and Medicaid programs, which were enacted through the 1965 amendments to the Social Security Act, placed the federal government in the central role of assuring access of the aged and the poor to needed medical care. In this article the trends in the sources of financing medical care services for the aged are examined. The distinction in terms of insurance coverage between acute care services and long-term care services is highlighted. The effect of the programs in terms of reducing the aged's direct financial cost of medical care, increasing their access to medical services, and improving their health status is explored. The unanticipated increase in the cost of these programs has led to a change in emphasis in public policy, from assuring access to mainstream medical care to containing the cost of providing care. The direction of new federal policies is analyzed, and it is concluded that no longer will it follow the private sector's specifications of the conditions and arrangements under which health services are provided to program beneficiaries.     

Fertility,family planning,and development: Indirect influences

This paper focuses on the indirect influences on changing fertility and on the direct and indirect influences on family planning effort. Complete data on the variables under consideration were gathered from a variety of sources for 65 developing countries. The results here should be generalized only to high fertility, high mortality, low education, and low per capita gross national product nations. 1) Some social variables, like education, are more important than others for explaining fertility and family planning effort. The treatment of social setting as a single variable obscures the importance of lower level education (literacy, primary, and secondary school enrollment) for fertility and family planning. 2) Ignoring the indirect influences on fertility may lead us to understimate the importance of some variables on fertility, and perhaps to overestimate the importance of others. When both direct and indirect effects (the latter through family planning effort) are examined, the impact of education increases to nearly equal that of family planning effort in 3 of the 4 models developed here. 3) Program effort can be explained at least as well with a single variable (literacy or female school enrollment) as with the composite variable "social setting." 4) In addition to its importance in explaining fertility, education may also be important in explaining mortality. 5) It appears that the absolute and relative status of women may be an important variable which has not yet been adequately measured. Overall, the results of this study lend additional support to the position that, in addition to family planning effort, education may play a more crucial role than is obvious in fertility reduction in developing countries.     

Dimensions of Child Abuse and Neglect Among Native and Immigrant Caribbean Families

Abstract

This study attempted to replicate a study that examined severity of physical child abuse among Barbados families with a sample of Caribbean families known to the New York City public child welfare agency. Study findings did not support the hypothesis that child abuse in the Caribbean community is linked to cultural child-rearing norms sanctioning the use of physical punishment of children, but were consistent with the largest body of research indicating that child abuse and neglect are driven by the complex interaction of interpersonal, economic, social and environmental factors.     

Population growth and foreign policy

Australian foreign policy is examined in light of the population issue and its relationships to its developing Asian neighbors. Rapid population growth has been a 20th-century phenomenon. In the ESCAP region, almost all governments are anxious to reduce growth rates and welcome international assistance for population programs. The motivation of these governments seems to be both political and economic. Asian countries do not share the view expressed at Bucharest by Latin American and African representatives that high population growth rates are not a problem. Results of national family planning programs in 16 developing Asian countries are assessed. Major fertility decline has only occurred so far in the most prosperous of these countries. Future fertility trends are hard to predict. Present inadequate knowledge of the determinants of human fertility and limited knowledge regarding fertility limitation techniques hamper progress in population reduction. Australia has aided these countries in demographic training and data collection. For both economic and humanitarian reasons, this aid should be extended to program implementation.     

Collective Remittances and Transnational Coproduction: the 3 × 1 Program for Migrants and Household Access to Public Goods in Mexico

Migrant hometown associations (HTAs) are mobilizing collective remittances to improve social welfare in their countries of origin. This paper assesses the effect of transnational coproduction of public goods in migrants’ places of origin by studying the 3?×?1 Program for Migrants. The 3?×?1 Program is a national social spending program in which the Mexican local, state, and federal government matches HTAs’ collective remittances to improve public services through cross-border public–private partnerships. The statistical analysis across municipalities that do and do not participate in the 3?×?1 Program shows that coproduction improves citizens’ access to public sanitation, drainage, and water, although not electricity. Moreover, a negative and statistically significant interaction term between 3?×?1 Program expenditures and family remittances reveals a substitution effect: in the presence of transnational coproduction, migrant households are less likely to improve public goods using family remittance resources, but in the absence of 3?×?1 Program participation they continue to improve their hometowns with family remittances. This research offers a theoretical mechanism and supporting empirical evidence of an important kind of intermediary institution improving social welfare in migrant places of origin.     

Accountability Practices in Public Child Welfare Services

The literature on child welfare caseworkers’ accountability practices is fairly scant. This article observes and unravels accountability in child welfare practices using interview data. Findings show that child welfare caseworkers (frontline workers) face multiple and conflicting goals and mandates imposed upon them by their organizations, systemic rules, procedures, their clients, and their own professional norms. There were conflicts among accountability sources and caseworkers manage accountability with multiple strategies. Most of the interviewees showed that they acknowledged the significance of accountability management. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Linking national and global population agendas: case studies from eight developing countries

This comparative study of the determinants of family planning policy initiation and implementation focuses on four pairs of countries: Zambia/Zimbabwe, Algeria/Tunisia, Pakistan/Bangladesh, and Philippines/Thailand. The conclusion is drawn that global efforts had an influence on national policy makers and on putting family planning issues on the policy agenda. Global impacts were affected by national economic and social conditions and the broader political and economic relations with Western countries. The absolute level of economic development was found to be unrelated to the timing of initiation of family planning on national policy agendas. Stronger national family planning programs occurred in countries where policy makers linked economic development at whatever level with the need to limit population growth. Pakistan and Thailand in the 1960s illustrated this commitment to family planning programs, and Zambia and Algeria illustrated the lack of connection between development and population growth at the policy level and the lack of family planning on the policy agenda. Affiliation with the West during the 1960s meant early initiation of family planning in Pakistan/Bangladesh and Philippines/Thailand. Stronger commitment to program implementation occurred only in Thailand during the 1970s and Zimbabwe during the 1980s. Commitment lessened in the Philippines and Pakistan. Program implementation and national support of family planning were viewed as also dependent upon domestic factors, such as sufficient resources. Algeria/Tunisia and Zambia/Zimbabwe were countries that promoted family planning only after national political ideology shifted and anti-imperialist sentiments subsided. The impact of the international Cairo conference on these countries was minimal in terms of policy change. Most of the countries however desired greater support from donors. Even objections from the Vatican and internal domestic pressures were insufficient to prevent countries such as the Philippines and Pakistan from supporting the Cairo Plan of Action and a family planning and reproductive health agenda. Bangladesh and Pakistan are given as examples of countries where differences in the focus of foreign aid impacted on the national support for social services.     

Ideas,Economics and 'the Sociology of Supply': Explanations for Fertility Decline in Bangladesh

The persistence of high rates of fertility in Bangladesh, despite the poverty of its population, has been given alternative, and apparently competing, explanations, including the absence of effective forms of family planning, the resilience of pro-natalist values and norms and the existence of material constraints which led to the reliance on children as economic assets. The recent and dramatic declines in fertility rates, in the absence of any apparent major economic changes in the decades prior to the onset of fertility decline, appears to contradict materialist explanations for fertility behaviour and to support explanations which stressed ideas about the acceptability of birth control and the availability of the means for doing so. This article argues that such an interpretation is based on an historical analysis of events in Bangladesh. It offers an alternative explanation which stresses socio-economic change as the primary motor for change in family size preferences, but which recognises the role of modern forms of family planning in facilitating the pace of the resulting fertility decline.     

Family policies and gender in Hungary, Poland, and Romania

This paper discusses changes and new directions in the gendered nature of the welfare state in three post-state socialist societies: Hungary, Poland and Romania. Relying on an analysis of laws and regulations passed after 1989 concerning child care, maternity and parental leave, family support, unemployment and labor market policies, retirement and abortion laws, the authors identify the differences and the similarities among the three countries, pointing out not only their status in 2001, but also their trajectory, the dynamics and timing of their change. The authors argue that there are essential differences between the three countries in terms of women’s relationship to the welfare state. They also specify some of the key historical and social variables which might explain variation across countries.     

Population and development: fact,fancy and politics

Massive population growth is an accepted fact in developing countries at a time when developed, Western countries, i.e., the U.S., have become increasingly disenchanted with foreign aid. The gap between the very rich and very poor becomes wider and sharper. Most people live either in countries where the per capita income is below $320 or above $1,280. Lowering fertility rates would be favorable to economic conditions in the long run but with little short-run effect, population control is not a high priority government activity. The theme of the 1974 Bucharest Conference was that if development were encouraged, fertility would take care of itself. Programs which directly influence fertility rates are needed to improve development. Family planning programs are low cost compared to other development policies, and they improve maternal and child health. Women cannot be educated or employed unless they have the freedom of choice not to have children or when to have children. Western enthusiasm for fertility control has been met with suspicion in many devleoping areas. Western attitudes should be balanced by restructuring world trade and constructing relationships which would hasten economic development.     

The relative importance of family planning and development for fertility reduction: Critique of research and development of theory

3 recent studies about the relative effects of family planning and development are reviewed in an effort to point out their limitations and to augment them. A tentative theoretical framework is presented from which the problem of fertility reduction may be viewed. Also presented is an analysis of the "outliers" in 1 of the 3 studies. This analysis involves consideration of macrosocial and contextual aspects of different nations as a supplement to other analyses. Mauldin and Berelson (1978) and Tsui and Bogue (1978) used indicators of social setting and family planning effort to explain declines in, respectively, crude birthrate between 1965 and 1975, and total fertility rates between 1968 and 1975. The 2 studies used nearly identical sets of explanatory variables. With both studies using the same indicators, except for "labor force," it is not surprising that the results were the same. The results were previously obtained by Freedman and Berelson (1976), who also used the Lapham Mauldin index of planning effort along with similar indicators of social setting. Freedman and Berelson found that birthrate declines could be explained better by program effort (which independently explained 17% of the variance in crude birthrate (CBR) declines) than by social setting (which independently accounted for 7% of that variance), and that the 1972 birthrate itself was similarly explained (15% of the variance attributed to program effort alone, 5% to social setting alone). Mauldin and Berelson obtained nearly identical results. In the Tsui and Bogue study, the contribution of the 1968 level of fertility was the dominant influence on the 1975 total fertility rate. The standardized regression coefficient indicated that previous fertility explained 50-60% of subsequent fertility by direct relationship, a figure comparable to the social setting family planning interaction effects (44-58%) in the 2 other studies. Much of this discussion is devoted to an analysis of the "outliers" in the exploratory data analysis done by Sykes for Mauldin and Berelson (1978). The outliers in Sykes' exploratory data analysis were divided along 2 dimensions. The first involves the relationship between predicted and actual reductions in fertility. The 2nd dimension refers to the independent variables used to predict the fertility declines. This analysis involves analysis of contextual variables and an analysis of distributional variables. It is limited by missing data, but the analysis of Freedman and Berelson (1976), Mauldin and Berelson (1978), and Tsui and Bogue (1978) is plagued by missing variables: contextual variables; distributional variables; and unique national, regional, or local circumstances. These can only be adequately revealed by case studies and may be important influences on fertility behavior. Effects of family planning and social setting may be conditioned by contextual variables (e.g., island status as in Taiwan), or unique circumstances (e.g., coercion as in India), and distribution appears to have an effect of its own.     

Introduction: the Political Consequences of Non-state Social Welfare in the Global South

Throughout the Global South, diverse non-state actors have historically played critical roles in enabling populations to meet their basic needs, whether by providing or mediating access to social benefits and programs. To date, little research explores non-state social welfare, particularly in the Global South, and existing studies tend to focus on technical and administrative concerns while neglecting the potential political ramifications. This introductory essay aims to conceptualize and theorize the politics of non-state social welfare. We highlight three dimensions of the political consequences of non-state social welfare, including the implications for state capacity, equity of access to social welfare, and experiences of citizenship. Based on this framework as well as the findings of the empirical contributions to the special issue, the essay concludes that non-state provision may pose more political challenges than proponents recognize, but its effects are ultimately contingent on the types of relationships between state and non-state providers.     

Deserving Shelter: Conditional Access to Accommodation for Rejected Asylum Seekers in Austria,the Netherlands,and Sweden

Abstract

Limitations in access to welfare services for noncitizens of a host country are structured through conditional entitlements, which require benefit claimants to meet certain conditions to access welfare services. This article explores the conditions and regulations determining access to state-organized accommodation facilities for non-removed rejected asylum seekers in Austria, the Netherlands, and Sweden and the way in which these conditions are implemented. Based on qualitative interviews with stakeholders and analysis of policy documents, I argue that qualities of deservingness, such as vulnerability and performance, determine noncitizens’ access to state-provided accommodation, which strengthens the logic of migration control.