Brazil fiscal and welfare spending demands will clash

Significance The economy is at a crossroads: high unemployment and increasing poverty are generating pressures for greater income transfers, but the delicate fiscal position is generating concern about long-term fiscal sustainability. Rising inflation has generated temporary fiscal relief, but for the coming years fiscal indicators are expected to worsen. Impacts Conflicting pressures between welfare spending and long-term fiscal equilibrium will worsen in coming months. The implementation of ‘populist’ policies for purely political purposes may prove unsustainable. Uncertainty about fiscal issues will contribute to deteriorating perceptions about the future of the economy.

No Common Ground? Public Knowledge about Welfare Spending in Turkey and its Social Divisions

Social policy research examining citizens’ welfare knowledge, which offers a gateway to their understanding of the policy context, has remained limited. Adapting the opportunity–motivation–ability framework borrowed from the literature on political knowledge to welfare knowledge, this article offers an analysis of new data from a nationwide survey to explore Turkish society’s knowledge of the composition of public social spending. Corroborating earlier findings in the literature, the article maintains that most people in Turkey overestimate the relative size of social assistance spending for the poor. However, different from previous findings, the majority and most pensioners are also ill-informed about the rank of public spending on old-age pensions, the most widely used social benefit absorbing the largest share of welfare spending. The article provides evidence of the social division of welfare knowledge in Turkish society based mostly on three opportunity-related variables: city of residence, gender and income.

An International Spatial Analysis of Welfare Spending’s Influence on Measles

BACKGROUND: National welfare policies have the potential to influence population health. Yet, no research has investigated the influence that welfare spending levels have on primary prevention interventions. METHODS: This study uses generalized linear mixed model Bayesian analysis to explore how welfare spending influences the relationship between measles counts and measles vaccination rates at a national level. Furthermore, models include random effects to account for the nested structure of countries within regions. A conditional autoregressive model was also developed to test for the influence of spatial relationships among the variables of interest. RESULTS: Analysis of the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) indicated that the non-spatial model (BIC=19743.090) was preferred over the spatial model (BIC = 24225.730). The final model found that both the first dose of measles vaccine (B = -0.835, 95% Cr. I. = -0.975, -0.699), public social protection (B = -0.936, 95% Cr. I. = -1.132, -0.744), and their interaction (B = -0.239, 95% Cr. I. -0.319, -0.156) had a negative influence on national measles counts. CONCLUSIONS: This finding indicates that welfare spending may enhance primary prevention interventions, like measles vaccination.

The Authoritarian Predisposition and American Public Support for Social Security

Authoritarianism, an individual-level predisposition that favors security, conformity, and certainty, has been powerfully linked with cultural conservatism and support for “strongman” politicians but weakly and inconsistently linked with public opinion toward economic issues. In examining this latter relationship, past work has tended to pose a dichotomous question, is authoritarianism associated with economic liberalism/conservatism or not? Here, I diverge from this approach and argue that authoritarianism is associated with support for one specific program—Social Security. I argue that the unique framing of this program, which emphasizes rule-following, certainty, and deservingness, should resonate with authoritarian-minded individuals. I test this with survey data, primarily from the American National Election Studies (ANES). Overall, I find a positive and substantively significant relationship between authoritarianism and support for Social Security but not for other types of domestic social welfare spending. These findings help us better understand the correlates of mass support for Social Security as well as the policy consequences of authoritarianism. These findings also suggest that Social Security will likely remain popular in an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party.

Lower welfare spending may curtail Brazil recovery

Significance The economic effects were immediate: a sharp outflow of portfolio capital, which generated exchange rate devaluation of 27.3% in three months; a contraction in GDP, driven down by services and the industrial sector and particularly evident in the second quarter; and a sharp increase in unemployment, which reached 14.4% in August 2020. Impacts Conflicting pressures between welfare spending and fiscal rectitude will mount in coming months. Poverty and inequality will again begin to rise. Reduced crisis-related spending may slow economic recovery this year.

Intergenerational Conflict or Solidarity in Hong Kong? A Survey of Public Attitudes Toward Social Spending

This study aims to investigate age-related differences in social spending preference in an Asian context, drawing on a random survey of more than 1000 adults in Hong Kong in 2013. Contrary to popular belief, older adults in Hong Kong hold a negative view toward welfare spending, especially when it is directed toward the poor population. In contrast, descriptive statistics reveal that younger people tend to support increased social spending on welfare assistance for the disadvantaged. The findings in this study provide evidence that reciprocity and solidarity in intergenerational relationships are present in Hong Kong. This demonstrates the nature of shifting social values held by different generations in a dynamic and demographically pressured Asian context. Amidst rising intergenerational conflict in different contexts in Asia, this study has profound implications for policymaking.

A burden on future generations? How we learned to hate deficits and blame the baby boomers

The idea that public borrowing places an intolerable burden on posterity is as old as the institution of public debt itself. But the debate over deficit-spending assumed an entirely new scope and import with the rise of the fiscal state in the early twentieth century, as governments assumed greater responsibilities with regard to public welfare and found themselves subject to a new kind of conflict concerning the uses and distribution of public income. In this context, the intergenerational argument against social welfare spending became an important tool in the fight against class redistribution. With a focus on American debates, this article provides a historical sociology of the idea that deficits constitute a burden on future generations, identifying the key historical turning points when this idea acquired new political resonance. In particular, the article investigates how we learned to blame baby boomers for the alleged ills of government deficit-spending and how this now ubiquitous motif of public discourse was reintroduced by the Virginia school public choice theorist James M. Buchanan and later refined by the chief proponent of generational accounting, Laurence Kotlikoff.

Undermining Governors: Argentina’s Double-Punishment Federal Spending Strategy

Throughout Latin American federations, programmatic welfare spending is increasingly nationally oriented and bureaucratically delivered. By explaining the logic and the effects of combining two types of federal spending, discretionary and non-discretionary, this article uncovers an additional driver that contributes to understanding policymaking and its implementation not only in Argentina, but potentially in other robust federal systems such as Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Using original data on federal infrastructure and programmatic social welfare spending for the twenty-four provinces of Argentina between 2003 and 2015, we provide empirical evidence that both forms of spending penalize opposition districts and more populated urban provinces (regardless of partisan affinity), and thus undercut the ability of key governors to become future presidential challengers. This research suggests that presidents of territorially diverse federations with strong governors can utilize the dual-punishment spending strategy to alter the balance of power, reinforcing the dominance of the center.