{"title":"The pursuit of welfare efficiency: when institutional structures turn ‘less’ into ‘more’","authors":"Christina Steinbacher","doi":"10.1007/s11077-024-09535-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Addressing current socio-economic crises strains public budgets and may threaten fiscal sustainability. Particularly in the welfare sector, where high expenditures meet poor controllability, efficient resource usage is essential to ensure future governments’ capability to act while alleviating current problems. Consequently, this paper asks: why are some countries more efficient in translating social expenditure into welfare outcomes? To answer this question, it is argued that efficiency is a matter of institutional structures and their vertical policy-process integration (VPI): efficiency depends on institutional structures’ capability to (1) ensure policymakers’ responsibility and to (2) provide coordinated feedback, thus pushing for considerate and informed resource use. Analysing the effect of VPI on the relationship between welfare efforts and social outcomes in 21 OECD countries over three decades, the results show that VPI can not only turn ‘less’ into ‘more’, but it also compensates for performance losses in the face of spending cuts.</p>","PeriodicalId":51433,"journal":{"name":"Policy Sciences","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Policy Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-024-09535-8","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Addressing current socio-economic crises strains public budgets and may threaten fiscal sustainability. Particularly in the welfare sector, where high expenditures meet poor controllability, efficient resource usage is essential to ensure future governments’ capability to act while alleviating current problems. Consequently, this paper asks: why are some countries more efficient in translating social expenditure into welfare outcomes? To answer this question, it is argued that efficiency is a matter of institutional structures and their vertical policy-process integration (VPI): efficiency depends on institutional structures’ capability to (1) ensure policymakers’ responsibility and to (2) provide coordinated feedback, thus pushing for considerate and informed resource use. Analysing the effect of VPI on the relationship between welfare efforts and social outcomes in 21 OECD countries over three decades, the results show that VPI can not only turn ‘less’ into ‘more’, but it also compensates for performance losses in the face of spending cuts.
期刊介绍：
The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual pieces that address key challenges, opportunities, or approaches in ways congruent with the perspective that this journal strives to maintain and extend.Officially cited as: Policy Sci
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
分享
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
扫码关注我们
