Impact of selected social welfare programs on poverty alleviation and health outcomes in Pakistan

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyse poverty alleviation and health outcomes through the effectiveness of two major programs launched by the government to uplift social welfare in Pakistan (Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) and the Sehat Sahulat Program (SSP). We also aim to explore the link between poverty and health in light of the BISP and SSP. Secondary data is utilized to carry out this study, where qualitative data is gathered from the beneficiaries’ interviews while quantitative data is based upon the poverty line. Through this study, we can conclude an overall positive impact of the BISP and SSP on two components of the Human Development Indicator (HDI) concerning poverty and health: standards of living and life expectancy. Although positive conclusions have been brought about by BISP such as a reduction in wasting (girls) and increased food consumption, it fails to substantially cover health and may even be ineffective if individuals face external shocks such as dangerous illnesses. Such findings strengthen the importance of the SSP as a social welfare program alongside the BISP to secure far more wholesome and successful outcomes. By exploring the interchangeable link between poverty and health and connecting it to these programs, we further assert the complimentary nature of the BISP and SSP and base our evaluation on it.

Evil Abroad and at Home

This chapter revisits the Cold War world, divided between capitalists and communists, a conflict that these curricula cast as a good-versus-evil morality play. American evangelicals allied with the Republican Party. They connected religion and corporate capitalism and rejected Democrats as New Deal socialists. These curricula praise Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out communism in the United States and condemn internationalism, especially the United Nations, as fostering a totalitarian, one-world government. They see the United States’ wars in Korea and Vietnam as insufficiently committed to the fight against communism. These textbooks weigh whether other nations developed collective political actions or social welfare programs; they deplore both as socialism or incipient communism. Decolonization made new parts of the world ripe for American capitalism or Soviet communism. They and their leaders were good or evil depending on whether they subscribed to the agenda of Christian conservatives.

Social Welfare History in the Age of Diversity

This policy perspective discusses three important social welfare programs—Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Temporary Aid to Needy Families—and offers an explanation of how they have expanded over time.

Serving the Unemployed: Do More Generous Social Insurance Programs Provide Better Quality Service?

The role and capacity of public administration in contributing to economic security is an increasingly important question. More generous social welfare programs may have greater capacity to insure households against risk, but those programs can effectively provide economic security only to the extent that public organizations deliver benefits promptly and properly to families in need. Administrative performance matters. Given that governments with more generous social programs have demonstrated social welfare to be a priority, are those governments also more likely to put effort towards better administration of welfare programs? This question is addressed here using administrative performance data from U.S. state-level unemployment insurance programs, from 2002-2015. Evidence points to a positive association between generosity and administrative quality: more generous states make fewer administrative errors and that relationship is driven by their making fewer underpayments. If unemployment insurance replacement rates reflect an institutionalized commitment to more generously protecting individuals from economic insecurity, that commitment is also evident in the types of administrative errors agents make.

THE SOCIAL NEEDS OF THE ELDERLY IN SOUTH BANGKA

The social needs of the elderly in the South Bangka Regency were expressed through the needs of affiliation, succorance, and deference. These needs seem to dominate the behavior of the elderly out there. Social ties with neighbours are very strong and each of them avoids conflicts or disputes. This study aimed to see which social needs were the most dominant among these needs so that the local government could be more appropriate in developing the social welfare programs for the elderly in their regions. This research involved 311 elderly people from 8 (eight) sub-districts in South Bangka Regency. The sampling technique used proportional random sampling based on the area of ​​each district. The results showed that the need for succorance was the most dominant with a mean rank of 548.09, the need for affiliation hit second place with a mean rank of 541.72 and the last one was the need for deference with a mean rank of 311.20. This showed that the need for attention was more dominant than the need to build a relationship and conformity with others. There is no difference in social needs between men and women, nor is there a significant relationship with age.

The Overdiagnosis of Bipolar Disorder Within Marginalized Communities: A Call to Action

This paper argues that the overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder (BD) is an urgent and underrecognized problem within the U.S., threatening to expose vulnerable Americans to heightened stigma and harmful drug effects while disguising the environmental and traumagenic roots of their distress. The paper traces BD overdiagnosis to biomedical assumptions about mental illness and to the decline of social welfare policies over the past twenty-five years. It calls on policymakers to address BD overdiagnosis by revising criteria in the DSM 5, developing psychosocial models of mental illness, and reintroducing protective social welfare programs. Finally, the paper urges social workers to educate themselves about the harms of BD overdiagnosis as well as to recognize their own role in medicalizing their clients’ distress.

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

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.

Social Welfare Policy in Japan

This chapter surveys main topics and debates related to the Japanese welfare state. For a long time, scholars disagreed on the basic facts about Japan’s postwar welfare state. Some said it was too small, other said it was not. This chapter solves this mystery by introducing the concept of functional equivalents. It explains how social welfare programs and their functional equivalents had become important components of the so-called Japanese model of capitalism in the postwar period. Once the new socioeconomic conditions that arose in the 1990s (demographic aging, economic stagnation, and financial liberalization), pressures for change intensified. The chapter demonstrates how the electoral context had set the political parameters on welfare politics in Japan differently before and after the 1994 electoral reform.

Government Programs Can Reduce Poverty

Chapter 15 provides an analysis of the effectiveness of social welfare programs in reducing poverty. Comparing pretransfer with post-transfer rates of poverty across a range of OECD countries demonstrates that poverty can be substantially reduced. The myth that government programs do not work in addressing poverty is simply incorrect. A number of European countries are able to cut their rates of poverty by up to 80 percent as a result of robust social policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality. In the United States, the Social Security and Medicare programs have been particularly effective in reducing the poverty rate among the elderly population.