scholarly journals Nigeria’s Working Poor Households: Characterizing Factors and Proposals for Social Welfare Programs

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Onyimadu Chukwuemeka
Keyword(s):  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Household Survey ◽  
Working Poor ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Household Expenditures ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Poor Households ◽  
Poor Families ◽  
Inducing Factors ◽  
Female Headed Households

The paper focuses on the increasing incidence of working poor families in Nigeria. Data from the ILO and NBS suggest that, not only is the number of working poor families in Nigeria increasing, despite governments efforts at increasing the number of jobs created. This point to the assertion that, removing working poor families out of poverty will not solely depend on their being employed. The paper uses data from Nigeria’s General Household Survey to characterize inducing factors of working poor families in Nigeria. The findings suggest that female – headed households, polygamous and divorced households, individuals who have never been married, size of employment establishment, and household expenditures, are determining factors of working poor families in Nigeria. We recommend the supplementing of working poor families incomes through Living wage and contributory savings, establishment of State Health Insurance Schemes, and affordable housing through a state guaranteed Mortgage Schemes.

Remittances and the Politics of Austerity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Germano
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Welfare Function ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Poor Families ◽  
International Migrants

Remittances sent by international migrants have become an increasingly important source of social welfare in the developing world. This chapter explores what remittances are, why migrants send them, and how poor families use them. I argue in this chapter that remittances are more than just gifts from one relative to another. They play a larger social welfare role that complements funds that governments spend on social welfare programs. This social welfare function has become particularly important in recent decades as developing countries have prioritized austerity and integrated into volatile global markets. I argue that by filling a welfare gap in an age of austerity, remittances help to reduce the suffering and anger that so often trigger political and social instability during times of economic crisis.

scholarly journals Between Life, the Curve and the Hammer Blow: Family, Poverty and Abandonment in the Time of COVID-19 in Lima, Peru

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-142
Author(s):  
Luis Alberto Suarez Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Economy ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Poor Families ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Hammer Blow

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic brought anxiety, contagion and death to Peru, which registered 288,477 cases after the first 100 days of the outbreak, leading to a state of emergency. The quarantine measures and mobility restrictions characterized as the “hammer blow” produced significant impacts on the most vulnerable and poor populations across the country. While the Peruvian government implemented a subsidy that augmented social welfare programs, unfortunately many poor families and independent workers were left out. The resulting impact of COVID-19 and the quarantine measures has exacerbated existing inequalities in Peruvian society, particularly along the lines of gender and class. This article uses extensive survey and other data from the city of Lima to analyze the social experience of the pandemic from the perspective of the family, the impact of the pandemic on the domestic economy and household management, and finally the dilemmas of care and routines within families.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Associations ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The New Deal

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

Trust in a Polarized Age

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Political Trust ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Downward Spiral

Americans today don’t trust each other and their institutions as much as they used to. The collapse of social and political trust arguably has fueled our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. But is the decline in trust inevitable? Are we caught in a downward spiral that must end in war-like politics, institutional decay, and possibly even civil war? This book argues that American political and economic institutions are capable of creating and maintaining trust, even through polarized times. Combining philosophical arguments and empirical data, the author shows that liberal democracy, markets, and social welfare programs all play a vital role in producing social and political trust. Even more, these institutions can promote trust justly, by recognizing and respecting our basic human rights.

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-247
Author(s):  
Ryan LaRochelle
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Block Grant ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Block Grants ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

Rights, Redistribution, and the Rise of the “Litigation State”: The Case of Disability Discrimination Laws

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
David Freeman Engstrom ◽  
David K. Hausman
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Test ◽  
State Level ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Cost Shifting ◽  
Disability Discrimination ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Disability Law ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Legislative Choice ◽  
Cost Shift

Critics have long maintained that the rights revolution and, by extension, the postwar turn to litigation as a regulatory tool, are the product of a cynical legislative choice. On this view, legislators choose rights and litigation over alternative regulatory approaches to shift costs from on-budget forms (for example, publicly funded social provisions, public enforcement actions by prosecutors or agencies) to off-budget forms (for example, rights-based statutory duties, enforced via private lawsuits). This “cost-shift” theory has never been subjected to sustained theoretical scrutiny or comprehensive empirical test. This article offers the first such analysis, examining a context where the cost-shift hypothesis is at its most plausible: disability discrimination laws, which shift costs away from social welfare programs by requiring that employers hire and “accommodate” workers with disabilities. Using a novel dataset of state-level disability discrimination laws enacted prior to the federal-level Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and a range of archival and other materials drawn from state-level legislative campaigns, we find only limited support for the view that cost shifting offered at least part of the motivation for these laws. Our findings offer a fresh perspective on long-standing debates about American disability law and politics, including judicial interpretation of the ADA and its state-level analogues and the relationship of disability rights activism to other rights-based political movements.

Elasticity of Medicaid Access with Respect to State Financial Distress

2018 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 384-387
Author(s):  
Victoria Perez ◽  
Joseph Benitez ◽  
Eric Seiber
Keyword(s):  
Unemployment Rate ◽  
Financial Distress ◽  
State Level ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Macroeconomic Shocks ◽  
Medicaid Enrollment ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Financial Conditions ◽  
State Budgets ◽  
Fiscal Distress

In 2016, total Medicaid spending, $574.2 billion, represented one-third of state budgets. Descriptive studies indicate that state policymakers adjust social welfare programs during times of financial distress, particularly Medicaid. The challenge of formally estimating this effect is that macroeconomic shocks increase Medicaid enrollment and state-level financial stress. We use an exogenous measure of Medicaid generosity to estimate the elasticity of Medicaid generosity with respect to financial conditions. We find Medicaid generosity is not adjusted during periods of fiscal distress, whether anticipated or not. Instead, we find a counter-cyclical Medicaid effect with generosity increasing with increases in the unemployment rate.

Health Needs of Homeless Children

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 82 (6) ◽  
pp. 938-940
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Homeless Persons ◽  
Homeless Population ◽  
Homeless Children ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Stable Housing ◽  
The Us ◽  
Community Ties ◽  
Societal Problems ◽  
Families With Children

Families with children represent more than one third of the homeless population nationally and more than 50% of the homeless population in many cities. Lack of a permanent dwelling deprives children of the most basic necessities for proper growth and development. Homeless children have unique risks that compromise their health status. Pediatricians are encouraged to be aware of this growing population of children and include them in their service and advocacy efforts. BACKGROUND A homeless person is defined by the National Governors Association as "an undomiciled person who is unable to secure permanent and stable housing without special assistance." The US General Accounting Office defines homeless individuals as those persons who lack resources and community ties necessary to provide for their own adequate shelter. Estimates of the number of people who lacked access to conventional dwelling or residence in 1987 range from 350,000 to more than 3 million.1 Although there is disagreement concerning the exact number of homeless persons, there is consensus that the numbers are large and continuing to increase.2 The average increase from 1986 to 1987 in the number of people needing shelter was 20%, and one quarter of this need could not be met with existing emergency shelters. (US Conference of Mayors, unpublished data, December 1987). Several societal problems contribute to the increasing rate of homelessness among American families, including lack of affordable housing; decrease in availability of rent subsidies; unemployment, especially among those who have held only marginal jobs; personal crises such as divorce and domestic violence; cutbacks in public welfare programs; substance abuse; and deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.

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