Cash Benefits in Social Welfare: Transformation of Legislation and Scientific Approaches to the Definition of Employed Concepts

The article analyzes the shortcomings of the conceptual apparatus characteristic of the right for social security in designating the types of social security provided in monetary form. In particular, there is a lack of necessary definitions (including key concepts such as "benefits" and "compensation"); lack of uniformity of terms (foregoing, the term "compensation" in some sources is used in the sense of "reimbursement of costs incurred by a person", traditional for the science of labor law, and in others a "civilized" approach to compensation as payments aimed at restoring the property sphere in case of encroachments on intangible goods is applied); "doubling" of concepts (for example, the appearance of "insurance payments" along with insurance "benefits"). Based on the analysis of the current legislation, it is concluded that there is no consistent distinction between the concepts of "benefits", "compensation", and other monetary payments. Nevertheless, a retrospective analysis of the sources of social security law, as well as ideas and approaches formed in science (not without the influence of the science of labor law), allows us to define certain types of social security payments. Unfortunately, they are not always reflected in the legislation on social security, as a result of which the scientific ideas themselves are undergoing changes, in particular, the criteria determining the essence of various social security payments are being enough. It seems that the directions for improving the system of sources of social security law should be the rejection of excessive terminological diversity in determining the types of social security, as well as the orientation to the approaches developed in science to their definition.Thus, it is proposed to use the category of benefits as a universal concept, referring to it social security payments in cash, which do not have specific features of other social security payments.

Work Hours Instability and Child Poverty: Response of the Safety-Net Programs

This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to investigate how intra-year caregiver work-hours volatility is related to child poverty, measured through both the official poverty measure (OPM) and the supplemental poverty measure (SPM). I further assess varying degrees of buffering effects of cash benefits, in-kind benefits, and tax transfers on income in the context of work-hours volatility. Results indicate that Black and Hispanic children, as well as those living with unpartnered single mothers, faced substantially higher variability in household market hours worked. Hispanic children experienced not only greater volatility in their caregivers’ work hours, but also higher poverty levels, even after taking government programs into account. I find that a 10 percent increase in intra-year hours volatility is linked to roughly a 2 percent and 1.6 percent increase in OPM and SPM child poverty, respectively. In-kind benefits are more effective in buffering household income declines resulting from unstable caregiver work hours, followed by tax transfers and cash benefits, which each offer somewhat less of a buffering effect. The effectiveness of near-cash benefits is particularly salient among Black children and children of unpartnered single mothers. Hispanic children also benefited from these transfers’ compensating effects, but to a lesser degree. These results provide new evidence to inform public policy discussions surrounding the best ways to help socioeconomically disadvantaged families to retain benefits and smooth their income in the face of frequent variation in work hours and, thus, earnings.

Impact of implementation of the Dependency Act on the Spanish economy: an analysis after the 2008 financial crisis

The aim of this paper is to assess the industry-wide impact of Long-Term Care (LTC) spending on the Spanish economy. LTC spending includes beneficiaries’ copayment and the impact is quantified in terms of output, employment and value added. To this purpose, we use an input–output model of the Spanish economy that allows us to further describe how the value added generated is distributed throughout the economy according to the existing benefit-mix (in kind services, cash benefit for informal care and cash benefit for personal assistance). Additionally, the model provides results on how the return on LTC spending would improve by using only in-kind services instead of the benefit mix currently in place. The 2012 Spanish Input–Output Table at current prices was extracted from the WIOD Database’s 2016 Release. Consumption data for dependent, employed, and unemployed households were collected from the Spanish Household Budget Survey for 2012. The findings reveal that the total annual costs are 7,205.43 million €, with total costs from in-kind services being almost 71% higher than total costs from cash benefits. Each million euros invested in in-kind services and CBPA would create 41.91 jobs (68.41% direct, 9.16% indirect and 22.43% induced). However, each million euros spent on cash benefits would result in 16.88 jobs overall (53.02% direct, 24.53% indirect and 22.45% induced). The total number of jobs is 151,353 at the aggregate level, being 46,840 depending on cash-benefits and 104,513 on in-kind services.

Do high-income households 'label' family cash transfers? Evidence on family expenditures from Australia

Naming cash benefits with explicit reference to “families” or “children” can nudge households into labelling the extra cash for child goods and child-oriented savings. Labelling has mainly been assessed among lower-income households. Yet if also higher-income households engage in labelling, family cash benefits may very well help with the costs of raising children, but not mitigate stark disparities in child-related investments along the income distribution.Relatively overlooked, we thus examine the occurrence of labelling among higher-income households. We exploit recent reforms that progressively excluded high-income households from Australia’s main cash provision for families with children, Family Tax Benefit. We use longitudinal data from Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) and an instrumented difference-in-differences design. We find that, in the absence of reforms, higher-income households would have kept labelling Family Tax Benefit for child goods (clothing), substituting for adult goods (alcohol). Different from lower-income households, those with higher incomes in our sample do not seem to assign family cash benefits to essentials in the home environment. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that higher-income households earmark cash benefits for children’s education fees, not on average, but only when women are the main financial decision-maker in the household. We conclude that expenditure responses, heterogeneous across households, may inform the design of family cash benefits, especially when socioeconomic gaps in family investments are a concern.

Welfare chauvinism across benefits and services

The article theorises how covering social risks through cash transfers and in-kind services shapes public attitudes towards including/excluding immigrants from these programmes in Western European destination countries. The argument is that public attitudes are more restrictive of granting immigrants access to benefits than to services. This hypothesis is tested across ten social protection programmes using original survey data collected in Denmark, Germany and the UK in 2019. Across the three countries, representing respectively a social democratic, conservative and liberal welfare regime context, the article finds that the public does indeed have a preference for easier access for in-kind services than for cash benefits. The article also finds these results to be stable across programmes covering the same social risks; the examples are child benefits and childcare. The results are even stable across left-wing, mainstream and radical right-wing voters; with the partial exception of radical right-wing voters in the UK. Finally, the article finds only a moderate association between individual characteristics and attitudinal variation across cash benefits and in-kind services.

Bullshit jobs. Around David Graeber’s concept in the context of the condition and current challenges of Polish social work

Taking David Graeber’s theory of bullshit jobs as basis the author argues in the text that it may refer to Polish social work. The analysis focus on the perception of their own professional duties by social workers, which is the basic condition for qualifying their work as a ’bullshit job’. The main problem axis is two ways to carry out social work: as work with people and work with documents. The conclusions concern the need to reflect on the current shape of social policy in Poland as the basis for social work and to divide the mentioned policy into social work and cash benefits.

Measuring the Generosity of Parental Leave Policies

In order to investigate and compare welfare states or specific welfare programmes, scientists, opinion‐makers and politicians rely on indicators. As many of the concepts or objects studied are somewhat abstract, these indicators can often only be approximations. In comparative welfare‐state research, scholars have suggested several approximating indicators to quantitatively measure and compare the generosity of public welfare provision, with a special focus on cash benefits. These indicators include social spending, social rights and benefit receipt. We present these indicators systematically, and critically discuss how suitable they are for comparing the generosity of parenting leave policies in developed welfare states. Subsequently, we illustrate how the operationalisation of leave generosity by means of different indicators can lead to different rankings, interpretations and qualifications of countries. Hence, indicator choices have to be considered carefully and suitably justified, depending on the actual research interest.