This book explores the incentives and effects of modern welfare policy, contrasted with outcomes of global basic income pilots in the past seventy years. The author contends that paternalistic and counterproductive eligibility rules in the modern American welfare state violate the human dignity of the poor and make it nearly impossible to escape the “poverty trap.” Furthermore, these types of restrictions are absent from expenditures aimed at middle and upper-income households such as mortgage interest deductions and tax-sheltered retirement accounts. Case examples from the author's years as a front-line social worker and interviews with basic income pilot recipients in Ontario, Canada, are woven throughout the book to better illustrate the effects of the current system and the hidden potential of more radical alternatives such as a universal basic income.

How well do you understand the sweeping welfare reforms of the mid-1990s? The Transition from Welfare to Work: Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes provides a comprehensive examination of the welfare-to-work initiatives that were undertaken just prior to and following the major reform of United States welfare legislation in 1996. It will familiarize you with the intent of those reforms and show you how those interventions have been implemented. It also explores the barriers to employment that must be overcome by welfare-to-work clients, and the impact of these changes on clients, employers, and society. From the editors: "Although the numbers enrolled in welfare programs dropped dramatically in the last few years of the economic expansion of the 1990s, until recently we have known very little about the conditions of families affected by welfare-to-work policies. How did welfare-to-work interventions change the lives of participants and their families? What factors helped or hindered the transition to paid work? Are welfare-to-work policies likely to have actually improved the earnings or income of former AFDC recipients? This book studies all these questions." The Transition from Welfare to Work: Processes, Challenges, and Outcomes presents qualitative, quantitative, and econometric analyses as well as panel studies, longitudinal, and quasi-experimental designs. Beginning with a brief description of the goals and structure of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, this book examines all of the phases of the welfare-to-work process. Use it to increase your understanding of: the implementation of interventions designed to place TANF recipients in jobs the factors that impact the readiness of low-income women to enter the job market the outcomes of current and earlier welfare-to-work interventions the steps we need to take to know how these citizens are faring in the welfare-to-work environment and more!

Welfare-to-work or activation policies refer to programmes aimed at promoting the employability, labour-market and social participation of benefit recipients of working age. Frontline workers delivering these policies are conceived of as policy implementers, as policy makers, and as actors mediating politics in an arena where conflicting interests are at stake. Frontline work plays a crucial role in determining what welfare-to-work practically means and how it affects the lives of the people it targets. Yet few books have deliberatively focused on comparing what happens when frontline workers, some of whom are professional social workers, meet clients. Pioneering the provision of scholarly reflections on both theoretical and policy relevance of studying frontline practices of delivering activation, internationally renowned researchers present the first comparative analysis of how activation policies are actually delivered by frontline staff in selected EU countries and in the United States. In trying to understand and interpret frontline practices in activation, each contribution provides insights into what ‘activation in practice’ looks like, what services are provided and how they are enacted. This involves examining processes of client selection, monitoring, sanctioning and motivating, as well as the role of external service providers. This book is an important acquisition for scholars and researchers of social policy, public administration, public management, social work and policy implementation.

Resource added for the Psychology (includes Sociology) 108091 courses.

Introduction -- Background, inception, and development -- Thresholds, financing, and beneficiaries -- Targeting performance -- Anti-poverty effectiveness -- From welfare to work -- Family expenditures and human capital investment -- Social participation and subjective well-being -- What next? : policy solutions and research directions -- References -- Acknowledgements

In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.