Universal Social Pensions Are Unaffordable … Not! Testing the Unaffordability Hypothesis in Latin America and the Caribbean

Is universal social assistance unaffordable? Targeting social policy has been praised as a magic solution to select the ‘deserving poor’ and efficiently use the scarce resources in the Global South. The article tests the unaffordability hypothesis using five counterfactual analyses based on expenditure redirection (military expenditure, energy subsidies, and the potential illegal/odious external debt servicing) and increasing tax revenues (income and trade tax) in up to thirty-three countries. The article shows the revenue-generating potential of taxes and reprioritising expenditures from unproductive to productive areas to finance – totally or partly- basic universal social pensions in large part of Latin America and the Caribbean; therefore, dispelling the unaffordability myth.

Financial Inclusion with Hybrid Organizational Forms: Microfinance, Philanthropy, and the Poor Law in Ireland, c. 1836–1845

The turbulent 1830s saw a sequence of great political and social reforms in the United Kingdom. One such reform was the introduction of a locally funded Poor Law in Ireland. The development of a nascent welfare system in 1838 coincided with a boom in the formation of microfinance institutions in Ireland. The focus of this study is the expansion of a hybrid organizational form, Loan Fund Societies (LFSs), in the ten years prior to the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. LFSs were legally established with a conflictual structure: acting as commercially viable charitable institutions required to provide credit to the deserving poor (to enable them to be self-sufficient) while dedicating their “profits” to supporting the indigent poor. This study uses an analytical framework drawing inspiration from institutional logics to explore and better understand Irish microfinance in the early nineteenth century, a period of profound socioeconomic and socioreligious changes. It seeks to explain the factors that motivated the establishment and de-establishment of microfinance institutions amid this tumult. Legislative changes in LFS business parameters in 1843 made the tensions between being charitable and commercially sustainable salient; and, for some, it made continued existence untenable.

Johannes Bugenhagen

Johannes Bugenhagen’s church orders revealed the lasting imprint of religious values on the poverty policies of many German cities. Originally from Pomerania (the coastal region of present-day Poland and Germany), Bugenhagen crafted legislation that included practical measures for poor relief. As a Wittenberg pastor, professor, and organizer of church reform, Bugenhagen became the diplomat for translating Lutheran ideals into practical laws that would reorganize or create new institutions of poor relief in north German cities, as well as in Scandinavia. In his negotiations with city councils and political rulers, he highlighted an emerging need to support poor pastors who, as married clergy, now had families to support. His experience of creating laws for diverse circumstances led him to delineate flexible policies with an adaptable understanding of the deserving poor.

The Village of the Damned? Narrative, Structure and the Coproduction of Translocal Mobility

Focusing on the re-emergence of an ancient folk tale about begging migration, Chapter 6 address the relationship between myths, moral narratives, and translocal livelihoods in Cambodia. Specifically, it interrogates a popular myth, known throughout Cambodia, about the cursed village of Prey Veng province where all inhabitants, rich or poor, must migrate to beg at least once a year. The chapter examines how the resurgence of this story is not only related to the rise in begging migration from some of Cambodia’s most agro-ecologically vulnerable southeastern provinces, but dynamically intertwined with the structural characteristics of that mobility. Specifically, it highlights how moral narratives of the ‘deserving poor’ shape translocal begging, engendering overlaps and interlinkages with other forms of labour migration that in turn serve to proliferate and entrench the curse myth. By comparing the form of the curse myth in Phnom Penh and Prey Veng, Chapter 6 concludes by considering how discourse is shaped, sustained and reproduced in translocal environments.

Portrait of the Underprivileged : Managing the Ignorant Substitute of Christ

The fourth chapter tackles the means and contents of moral management aimed at the poor the Company of the Daughters of Charity helped. Focusing on the ideas and attitudes of the Company toward their benefactors, the chapter examines prejudice and love as motives in charity work and argues for the prevalence of the latter. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the contents of this moral management and finds that only a certain group of people were helped, the so called deserving poor, who were educated to become chaste and working members of society. This was not only in line with contemporary thinking of social order, but also part of the survival strategy that separated the order from erudite cloistered orders.

War Widows and Welfare Queens

This chapter examines the sociocognitive dimensions of cultural categorizations of deservingness. The social issue of poverty has been a persistent source of debate in the American system of policy development, influenced by conceptual distinctions between the “haves” and “have-nots,” “working moms” and “unemployed dads,” and the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” Although there is a wealth of literature discussing the ideological underpinnings of stratification systems, these discussions often focus on categorical distinctions between the poor and the nonpoor, with much less discussion of distinctions made among the poor. Moreover, while scholars of culture and policy have long referenced the importance of cultural categories of worthiness in policy development, the theoretical significance of these distinctions has been largely understudied. I expand the discourse on the relationship between cultural representations of worth and social welfare policy by exploring how these categories are conceptualized. Drawing on analytical tools from a sociology of perception framework, I create a model that examines deservingness along continuums of morality and eligibility to highlight the taken-for-granted cultural subtleties that shape perceptions of the poor. I focus on social filters created by norms of poverty, welfare, and the family to explore how the deserving are differentiated from the undeserving.

Conclusion

The problem of poverty was not a new one after 1560, and the desire to improve the treatment of the deserving poor (and to exclude and control the undeserving) was not an invention of the Protestant Reformation, nor of the sixteenth century. The Scottish Protestant reformers certainly wanted to improve welfare provision. But far more important than their rhetorical statements on the issue, or those of their opponents, were the institutional mechanisms they created as part of their new church. Through the kirk session, the Reformation of 1559–60 created the possibility for a localised and routine system of poor relief that was entirely unprecedented in Scotland. In the following decades, local ministers, elders and deacons began to put that possibility into practice....

Governing the poor in Guangzhou: Marginalization and the neo-liberal paternalist construction of deservedness

Since the early 21st century, the Chinese government has proactively expanded social protection by providing better benefits and broader coverage for its people. However, a new puzzle has emerged in the Minimum Living Standard Scheme, ‘last resort of social protection’ in China. Normally, when the benefit standard is set higher, relatively more people situated below this line are entitled to receive assistance. However, in reality fewer people than expected receive support. We study the case of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, to explain this phenomenon and analyse the social citizenship of marginalized groups in urban China. We reveal the decline in replacement rates and tighter conditionality applied to defining the ‘deserving poor’ by reviewing administrative data and policy documents from 1995 to 2016. Drawing on the longitudinal qualitative study conducted between 2009 and 2011, we further illustrate how the decreased replacement rate and tighter conditionality diminish the well-being of the poor. Our findings on policy changes and their outcomes in Guangzhou provide some important insights into poverty governance and social citizenship under China’s social development in the past decade.