International Journal of Social Welfare最新文献

An ecosocial approach implies integrating social and ecological sustainability on all levels of social work practice (Boetto, British Journal of Social Work, 2017:47(1), 48–67). This survey study explored the frequency of ecosocial work practices in Finnish social work and the factors that enable or hinder adopting ecosocial work in social work practice. The study found that ecosocial work practices are quite rarely applied in Finnish social work. It indicates that personal interest in and knowledge of the ecosocial approach, organizational practices, and client attitudes play an important role. Social welfare professionals as well as the organizations where they work should be informed of environmental issues affecting human wellbeing and of the ecosocial approach in social work. This study examines the present state of the ecosocial approach in Finnish social work and provides opportunities to reflect on the relationship between social work and the natural environment.

The Sample of Integrated Welfare Benefit Biographies (SIG) provides comprehensive administrative data on the labour market participation, household composition and financial situation of welfare benefit recipients and their household members in Germany between 2007 and 2020. The SIG data enables research on the dynamics of welfare receipt and labour market participation of welfare recipients. The aim of the article is to introduce the SIG and to showcase its analytical potential by empirically examining benefit loans that can be granted by welfare agencies when unexpected expenses cannot be covered by welfare recipients themselves. Loans and detailed further financial information available can be used to assess the severity of financial restrictions during welfare receipt. We found that 2% of welfare recipients received loans at least once during their benefit episode and that loans were most likely to be granted right at the beginning of a benefit episode. Moreover, the likelihood of loans increased with higher benefit needs and when a parallel employment episode started.

To err is human, and as such, administrative errors are an inevitable component of current and future welfare state bureaucracy. Hitherto, while studies on administrative burden have shown us that routine interactions with welfare bureaucracy are often burdensome, very little is known about the nature of these interactions when something goes wrong. Most social policy and public administration scholarship focus on ex-ante analysis of administrative errors, with only scant research devoted to ex-post analysis of how claimants experience such errors once they occur, and the types of costs they may incur. This article contributes to the growing field of administrative burden research by examining welfare claimants' experiences of administrative errors. Analysis of 19 interviews with Israeli benefit recipients uncovered two themes. The first related to the process of correcting errors, including identifying and communicating them to the system. The second theme addressed the consequences of errors: on the one hand, economic and emotional costs including loss of trust in the system, and on the other, acquiring bureaucratic skills. These findings highlight bureaucratic errors as a critical and unique site of learning burden, as well as the need for a human contact to allow claimants to better deal with their consequences.

Major societal changes, such as the ongoing climate crisis, and the population ageing, affect the relations between generations within societies. The concept of generational contract is widely used to study these relations. However, the concept is rarely clearly defined, and the contents and terms of the contract, as well as the parties involved remain unclear. This article provides a systematic literature review on the definitions of the concept of generational contract. The literature searches were performed in June 2022 and yielded a total of 502 hits. After applying the exclusion criteria 76 peer-reviewed research articles were included in the data. The inductive thematic analysis of the articles resulted in nine main components that define the generational contract. These nine components relate to types of contracts, parties involved, distributional issues, maintenance, value-base and risks. Studies did not problematise the apolitical, gendered and heteronormative nature of generational contracts.

This article analyses the driving factors behind the formation of individual work values in European welfare states. By comparing relative preferences for extrinsic and intrinsic work values, we shed light on the discussion of the effects of intergenerational transmission and the structuring effects of labour market policies and regional opportunity structures on the formation of work values. Therefore, a multilevel analysis is applied using the innovative CUPESSE data set, which provides data on young adults and their parents in 65 NUTS-1-regions from 11 European countries. The results show that individual work values of young Europeans are most substantively shaped by the respective values of their parents. Furthermore, we demonstrate that individual characteristics such as sex, education and personal unemployment experiences determine preferences for work values. Finally, the paper shows that the local labour market context and welfare state arrangements also play a decisive role in the formation of individual work values.

This article evaluates a national project for the integration of long-term unemployed and disadvantaged groups of jobseekers implemented in the Czech Republic since 2019. It discusses how individual work and active labour market policy measures for these groups have changed, and what the outcomes were. We combined a quantitative evaluation of the targeting and outcomes of the measures with a qualitative evaluation of changes in the project implementation through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions conducted at the Labour Office branches. The findings show the need to broaden the availability of hard measures such as private-sector placement subsidies for the most disadvantaged jobseekers, and to improve soft measures (counselling and training), especially if front-line workers do not have sufficient competences for individual work. We are cautious about generalising the findings, as the pandemic complicated the implementation of soft measures.

In Europe, gambling policy is conditioned by different administrative levels, including national authorities and the EU, as well as institutions of the European Economic Area (EEA). The legal framework of the EU/EEA requires Member States to pursue evidence-based policy. The current scoping review focuses on what kind of policy research is available on gambling in the European context to support evidence-based policy. We searched three scientific databases for research literature on gambling regulation and policy in the European context. The final sample consists of 88 papers. We analysed the corpus with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency mapping, and, narratively, by applying the policy cycle phases (agenda-setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation). Overall, the results show that gambling policy research is a growing field in Europe, and the policy cycle describes the available literature amply. The largest part of the existing research concerns the evaluation phase, while the formulation and implementation phases are under-represented. The findings are discussed in terms of the main outcomes, as well as in terms of the gaps in the existing research.

Many European countries employ Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the administration of public benefits. However, there is limited understanding of how RPA is applied at the client level. This article investigates the utilization and impact of RPA use on social assistance (SA) distribution in Sweden, drawing on a sample of 800 SA applications in four Swedish municipalities. The results show that RPA use correlates with applicants' country of birth, age and duration of SA receipt. Additionally, RPA implementation coincides with less generous decisions, disproportionately affecting financially vulnerable groups. Rather than a correlation between generosity and the technology itself, the results suggest a conflict between the reorganisation of SA administration during RPA implementation and the principle of individualized judgments inherent in SA casework. Hence, public organisations are encouraged to ensure that their adoption of RPA neither exacerbates unequal access to services nor compromises professional discretion in favour of efficiency-driven measures.

Poverty was already a main problem in Afghanistan even before, but it has exacerbated due to the pandemic. However, the actual impact of the pandemic on households had not been investigated. This study provides such analysis using data obtained from a strictly random survey of 1060 households in the capital of Balkh, the fourth most populated province in Afghanistan. Using headcount ratio and poverty gap measures and both income and expenditure approaches, the results show that an additional 12% of households fell below the poverty line, from an already high of 75% before the pandemic. The poverty gap index rises to 34%, but the computed Gini coefficient indicates no significant change in inequality. Poor governance and corruption in Afghanistan are major impediments to address the issue of poverty. This paper suggests several measures which can be implemented to have effective policies and governance to alleviate poverty.

Human development is an important variable in entrepreneurial activities at all levels both nationally and internationally. In any country, the meaning of human development, which is associated with progressiveness in people's life status, is to be evaluated based on people's livelihood. The government is the core institution responsible for human development in any country through financing, coordinating, and supervising different human development projects. Such development projects include the provision of quality public goods and services such as health, education, housing, and other welfare schemes; all necessary infrastructures relating to the provision of such services like schools and hospitals; and respective experts to facilitate such services like teachers, doctors, and nurses, etc. Tax is regarded as an important tool for governments not only for revenue generation but also for achieving various social and economic reforms for individuals and the economy as a whole, both in developed and developing countries. Most of the current economic discussions from the country level to the international level are about human development, with taxation as the main tool. Thus, economic reforms including tax policies are also made for poverty reduction and other purposes. Among policies include progressive taxation and credit approach; establishment of specific taxes and specific revenue pools for improving human development and reducing inequality; and eliminating tax exemption and reliefs in fighting against poverty.