Social Welfare and Social Insurance

Brings the regional and local to the forefront of social investment debates by showcasing original, evaluative evidence from ten European countries, and provides practical, accessible illustrations of good practice, routes to success, and lessons learned.

East Asian societies and welfare systems are rapidly changing. This original volume considers welfare attitudes in East Asia, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan. It proposes new methods and approaches to analysing cross-national variations in welfare attitudes.

This book addresses the development of increasingly individualised public social services in the EU. It focuses particularly on activation services that have become crucial in the 'modernisation' of welfare states, comparing their introduction in the UK, Germany, Italy, Finland and the Czech Republic.

The original analysis in this book presents a new and comprehensive narrative of social welfare in the Middle East through an examination of the role of religious welfare.

Contributions reflect key developments in the UK and internationally. and focus on developments and change in core UK social policy areas. Additional chapters provide in-depth analyses of topical issues in UK and international perspective, while this year's themed section is 'New Labour'.

Research into minimum income standards and reference budgets around the world is compared in this illuminating collection from leading academics in the field.

This is the first English-language book to take a comparative look at the Italian welfare state as a whole since the 2008 economic crisis and will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers as well as students.

The strengths, weaknesses and enforcement of concepts of international human rights receive a new social policy perspective in this insightful review of a pressing debate. Drawing on examples from around the world, it sets out the evolving role of universal rights in domestic and international policy and human welfare.

Welfare reform is a central part of the modernisation programme adopted by the Labour Government since 1997. This book examines the role of Parliament in the formulation and scrutiny of welfare policy, focusing in particular on how MPs and Peers view their influence on policy.

Delivering a timely account of the misconceptions of policies, discourses and representations around austerity in the UK, Dabrowski illustrates the complex ways through which austerity is experienced by women in their everyday lives.

This inter-disciplinary study considers the past, present and future of mental health services and community care. From the origins of provision as we know it in the 1960s, it sets out the political, economic and bureaucratic factors behind recent crises and considers what the founding principles of community care tell us about the way forward.

Pro-'workfare' governments justify their policies by claiming 'workfare' helps enhance self-esteem and promote the dignity of the unemployed. On the other hand, welfare activists argue that 'workfare' suppresses the dignity of unemployed persons. This book examines the concept of human dignity in this context and attempts to clarify its meaning.