The World Bank and the reconstruction of the ‘social safety net’ in Russia and Eastern Europe: Paul Mosley

2012 ◽  
pp. 239-257
2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (No. 2) ◽  
pp. 57-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Lošťák

In relation to sustainable rural development, the paper starts with the question of its conditions. One of them is social acceptance of various projects or programmes. This issue is joined with the co-ordination of human activities. The mechanism facilitating the co-ordination in contemporary societies is related to social capital. Its concept is outlined through the references to the basic literature about the topic. Using content analysis, based on the quantification of the categories created through the analysis of the literature about the topic, the social capital in selected municipalities is investigated. The main aim of the paper, however, is to show the role of this method in social capital fast identification. Although the approach necessitates further elaboration, it can be considered as the first important step in the practice of development activities. The background of the paper reflects the challenges of the World Bank concerning the elaboration and development of the new methods of measuring social capital.


Author(s):  
Jane Jenson

In the mid-1990s, the practice of international organizations began to cohere around the social investment perspective, with strategies that were child-centred and advocated human capital investments for economic growth and social development. This chapter examines the World Bank, which endorsed the policy instrument of conditional cash transfers (CCT) to allow very poor families to invest in children’s health and education—a stock-plus-buffer strategy. Then it scans the OECD, which recommended early childhood education to ensure human capital development and the labour-market activation of parents—a stock-plus-flow strategy. Both organizations developed anti-poverty positions with attention to the intergenerational transfer of disadvantage and investments in human capital. This similarity has declined in recent years, as the World Bank incorporated the social investment perspective into its new inclusive growth frame, while the OECD turned its attention to problems of inequality rather than poverty and thereby associated itself less with the social investment perspective.


2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 144-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Phillipson

Debates on globalisation have become an important area within the social sciences. The purpose of this chapter is to extend this discussion to the study of ageing and in particular the field of critical gerontology. Some of the concerns here include issues around inequality and social divisions running through the life course. These are being changed and influenced in new ways by the political and economic changes associated with globalisation. The argument of the paper is that globalisation brings forth a new set of actors and institutions influencing the social construction of public policy for old age. Some of the themes covered in this paper include the rise of transnational bodies such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, problems affecting people in the developing world, the acceleration of global migration in various forms, and changes in the nature of citizenship and citizen-rights. The chapter concludes by setting out the case for an ‘age- sensitive’ globalisation that can provide an effective challenge to new forms of inequality and exclusion.


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