Benefit Recipients Research Articles

Immigrants' Unemployment Drivers: Evidence from Switzerland

Immigrant groups, especially those originating from non-European countries, tend to experience disadvantage in the labour market and to be overrepresented among the recipients of welfare benefits. This outcome is sometimes explained with reference to migration-related factors such as weaker work values than natives (i.e., acceptability of remaining on benefits), smaller and lower quality of informal networks and lower levels of psychological well-being. Indeed, we find that these factors significantly influence unemployment duration in the expected direction. However, they explain only a small share of the overall disadvantage that some immigrant groups experience. We conclude that at least some of the large differences we observed in unemployment duration are likely due to discrimination by employers.

Work-Related Sanctions in European Welfare States: An Incentive to Work or a Violation of Minimum Subsistence Rights?

Since the 1990s (Western) European welfare states have adopted a series of reforms aimed at promoting the return to employment of recipients of social assistance benefits. The economic crisis has prompted welfare states to cut the expenditures on enabling instruments and to opt increasingly for work-related sanctions (i.e. sanctions that are imposed on recipients who fail to comply with activation measures). This paper examines the regulation of work-related sanctions from a social rights perspective in 25 European welfare states. Based on this perspective, the paper investigates, first, the extent to which work-related sanctions are mitigated by specific legal clauses and by the composition of the social assistance benefits. Second, this paper investigates the relationship between the socio-economic situation of the European welfare states and the harshness of the sanctions. The paper concludes that the socio-economic situation in countries that have adopted harsh work-related sanctions reinforces the risk of violation of the right to minimum means of subsistence. The (relative) lack of mitigation clauses in these countries further reinforces this effect. In order to prevent this effect this paper recommends the construction of a system of social assistance benefits on which basis a work-related sanction only affects a basic component of social assistance benefits, without touching components for the costs for children, paternity, rent, heating and the partner.

Wenig gebildet, viel sanktioniert? Zur Selektivität von Sanktionen in der Grundsicherung des SGB II

Abstract Welfare benefit recipients who are subject to benefit sanctions live below the subsistence level for a fixed period of time. Individuals with low education bear an increased risk of being sanctioned. Quantitative analyses of linked administrative and survey data indicate that this increased risk cannot be attributed to a lower motivation to work or a lower willingness to make concessions regarding job offers. Our analyses of qualitative interviews and individual case files reveal complex processes: Low cultural capital when dealing with administrative matters, a habitual distance vis-à-vis job center employees as well as previous negative attributions in case files can advance the sanctioning of low-skilled welfare recipients. In this way, sanctions contribute to the (re)production of social inequality.

Income management in New Zealand and Australia: Differently framed but similarly problematic for Indigenous peoples

Income management, which reduces the control that benefit recipients have over social security income by quarantining a percentage for approved expenses, was introduced in both Australia and New Zealand in the late 2000s. In Australia, income management explicitly targeted Indigenous communities, being initiated as part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007, then later extended to other benefit recipients. In New Zealand, all 16- and 17-year-old benefit recipients and 18-year-old parents on a benefit became subject to income management in 2012 as a means to inhibit future ‘welfare dependency’ amongst young people. Despite the absence of an explicitly racialised framing in New Zealand, this article contends that both income management programmes represent a form of institutional racism, disproportionately affecting Indigenous peoples and significantly limiting Indigenous opportunities for self-determination.

Socioeconomic Inequalities in Psychological Distress among Urban Adults: The Moderating Role of Neighborhood Social Cohesion.

BackgroundVarious studies have reported socioeconomic inequalities in mental health among urban residents. This study aimed at investigating whether neighborhood social cohesion influences the associations between socio-economic factors and psychological distress.MethodsCross-sectional questionnaire study on a random sample of 18,173 residents aged 16 years and older from 211 neighborhoods in the four largest cities in the Netherlands. Psychological distress was the dependent variable (scale range 10–50). Neighborhood social cohesion was measured by five statements and aggregated to the neighborhood level using ecometrics methodology. Multilevel linear regression analyses were used to investigate cross-level interactions, adjusted for neighborhood deprivation, between individual characteristics and social cohesion with psychological distress.ResultsThe mean level of psychological distress among urban residents was 17.2. Recipients of disability, social assistance or unemployment benefits reported higher psychological distress (β = 5.6, 95%CI 5.2 to 5.9) than those in paid employment. Persons with some or great financial difficulties reported higher psychological distress (β = 3.4, 95%CI 3.2 to 3.6) than those with little or no financial problems. Socio-demographic factors were also associated with psychological distress, albeit with much lower influence. Living in a neighborhood with high social cohesion instead of low social cohesion was associated with a lower psychological distress of 22% among recipients of disability, social assistance or unemployment benefits and of 13% among citizens with financial difficulties.ConclusionsResiding in socially cohesive neighborhoods may reduce the influence of lack of paid employment and financial difficulties on psychological distress among urban adults. Urban policies aimed at improving neighborhood social cohesion may contribute to decreasing socio-economic inequalities in mental health.

The impact on health of employment and welfare transitions for those receiving out-of-work disability benefits in the UK

Employment status has a dynamic relationship with health and disability. There has been a striking increase in the working age population receiving out-of-work disability benefits in many countries, including the UK. In response, recent UK welfare reforms have tightened eligibility criteria and introduced new conditions for benefit receipt linked to participation in return-to-work activities. Positive and negative impacts have been suggested but there is a lack of high quality evidence of the health impact when those receiving disability benefits move towards labour market participation. Using four waves of the UK’s Understanding Society panel survey (2009–2013) three different types of employment and welfare transition were analysed in order to identify their impact on health. A difference-in-difference approach was used to compare change between treatment and control groups in mental and physical health using the SF-12. To strengthen causal inference, sensitivity checks for common trends used pre-baseline data and propensity score matching. Transitions from disability benefits to employment (n = 124) were associated on average with an improvement in the SF12 mental health score of 5.94 points (95% CI = 3.52–8.36), and an improvement in the physical health score of 2.83 points (95% CI = 0.85–4.81) compared with those remaining on disability benefits (n = 1545). Transitions to unemployed status (n = 153) were associated with a significant improvement in mental health (3.14, 95% CI = 1.17–5.11) but not physical health. No health differences were detected for those who moved on to the new out-of-work disability benefit. It remains rare for disability benefit recipients to return to the labour market, but our results indicate that for those that do, such transitions may improve health, particularly mental health. Understanding the mechanisms behind this relationship will be important for informing policies to ensure both work and welfare are ‘good for health’ for this group.

여성장애인 노동시장 진입 영향요인에 관한 종단연구

본 연구는 여성장애인의 노동시장 진입에 영향을 미치는 요인을 파악하여, 여성장애인의 노동시장 진입을 지원할 수 있는 정책적인 대안을 제시하는 데 그 목적이 있다. 이를 위해서 장애인고용패널조사의 3차부터 7차까지의 종단자료를 활용하여 사건사분석을 실시하였다. 사건사분석을 통해 시간의 변화에 따른 여성장애인의 노동시장 진입이 어떠한 변화유형을 나타내는지, 영향을 미치는 요인은 무엇인지 분석하고자 하였다. 분석결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 미취업기간에 따른 노동시장 진입의 변화를 생명표 분석을 통해 분석한 결과, 최장 미취업기간(4년)까지 미취업상태로 남아있는 비율은 90%이고, 노동시장에 진입한 비율은 10%로 나타났다. 둘째, 노동시장 진입에 영향을 미치는 요인을 파악하고자 콕스회귀분석을 한 결 과 기초수급 여부, 장애정도, 구직 시 차별경험 요인이 노동시장 진입에 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과를 통해 여성장애인의 노동시장 진입 수준을 높이기 위한 실천적 방안을 제안하였다. The purpose of this research is to grasp the influencing factors on the labor market entry of disabled women, and to suggest policy alternatives to support the labor market entry of them. This article utilized the survey data of the 3rd to the 7th Panel Survey of Employment for the Disabled in 2010-2014(by PSED), which is a longitudinal survey for the disabled in Korea. I analyzed the pattern changes of the labor market entry of them with the passage of years, and the influencing factors on that by the event history analysis. The major findings are as follows: First, according to the life table analysis involved in change of the labor market entry, 90% of them continued to remain the longest period of unemployment for four years and the labor market entry rate was only 10% of them. Second, the result of Cox regression analysis shows that public benefit recipient or not, the degree of disability and discrimination experience at the job market were factors to affect the labor market entry. With these results, this study suggested the practical alternatives to improve the labor market entry of disabled women.

Only Making Things Worse: A Qualitative Study of the Impact of Wrongly Removing Disability Benefits from People with Mental Illness.

Many countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have seen a considerable increase in the number of disability benefits recipients (DBRs), in addition to an increase in the proportion of people with mental illness. As in other countries, changes to the welfare benefits system in England were made in order to reduce the number of DBRs. Many people lost their benefit payments, although a considerable number had them reinstated after appeal. Our aim was to investigate the impact of the process on DBRs whose disability was related to mental health and who won their appeal. Seventeen DBRs were interviewed. The participants reported three main types of impact. Beyond the practical reduction of income and the related anxiety, interviewees reported considerable stress when coping with the ‘never-ending’ cycle of bureaucracy. They also expressed anger, frustration and demoralisation at mistrust on the part of the authorities partly due to the ‘invisibility’ of their disability.

The Deservingness Heuristic and the Politics of Health Care

Citizens’ social policy opinions are strongly influenced by a simple heuristic: Are the recipients of social benefits deserving or not? Adding to this growing literature, we provide evidence that the deservingness heuristic does not treat all social benefits alike. Already at the level of preconscious processing, the heuristic displays a bias toward tagging the recipients of health care—that is, sick individuals—as deserving. This powerful, implicit effect overrides other opinion factors and produces broad‐based support among the public for health care—across levels of self‐interest, media frames, ideological divides, and national cultures. In contrast, when the deservingness heuristic is utilized for reasoning about unemployment benefits, implicit psychological constraints are fewer and political conflict erupts depending on differences in interest and worldviews. Using a variety of methodologies, we track this fundamental difference between the politics of health care and unemployment benefits from the level of implicit processing to the level of political attitudes.

Development of minimum livelihood guarantee programmes in urban China: an empirical analysis based on 31 regions over 2003–2013

The Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (MLG) system in urban China is functioned as the last resort safety net for poor people and plays a substantial role in poverty reduction. This paper provides new empirical insights into the MLG development across 31 regions in urban China between 2003 and 2013. In addition to widely used indicators like benefit levels and number of benefit recipients, we construct two indicators of MLG replacement rates to measure the generosity of the benefits relative to income from work. The results show that the development of the urban MLG system in China has followed different tracks before and after 2008. Since 2008, the governments have made great efforts to increase the generosity of the MLG system while put more stringent conditions on MLG beneficiaries. Moreover, since 2008, the generosity levels of the MLG programmes began to converge across regions.

Measuring the Size of the Public Sector: A Broad View of Social Expenditure across Countries

Most analyses of public budgets – of which social spending is an important element - are based on gross (before tax) public expenditure data. However, a narrow focus on such information can be terribly misleading as it ignores that governments sometimes claw back social spending through taxation of benefit income, while also using tax systems to directly provide social support to households (e.g. child tax credits). Governments also tell or encourage individuals and companies to arrange social support (e.g. mandatory employer-provided sickness payments or favourable tax treatment of private pension contributions). Accounting for the impact of the tax system on budgetary allocations with a social purpose leads to indicators on net public social expenditure. Also capturing private social spending facilitates considering what part of an economy’s domestic production recipients of social benefits draw on: net total social expenditure. These indicators give a comprehensive view of social spending within and across countries.

Conceptualising the active welfare subject: welfare reform in discourse, policy and lived experience

The idea of the active welfare subject has become irresistible to both policy makers and academics and has taken a lead role in the transformation of twenty-first century social security systems. Two distinguishable approaches have emerged – the dominant model and a counter model. The dominant model emphasises moralised individual responsibility for ‘wrong choices’ and mandates behavioural change to become active. The counter model situates benefit recipients in the present as disempowered creative, reflexive and resourceful beings. This article develops conceptualisations by comparing benefit recipients’ accounts (from an exploratory qualitative study) of lived experience with both models.

Getting Sick and Disabled People off Temporary Benefit Receipt: Strategies and Dilemmas in the Welfare State’s Frontline

This article explores responses by frontline workers in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Service (NAV) to activation policy measures. Frontline workers in NAV are required to write work capability assessments for long-term sick and disabled benefit recipients within a reformed organizational structure with holistic agencies (‘one-stop shops’). These policy mechanisms are intended to empower the frontline workers and make them emphasize work and activation in their evaluation of the employability of the beneficiaries. However, a large number of long-term sick and disabled people remain in receipt of temporary benefits. Key findings emerging from this study’s fieldwork suggest that frontline workers often perceive the task of clarifying the employability status of longterm sick and disabled people to be demanding. Their assessments hinge on criteria set by actors outside the frontline office—and these criteria are hard to obtain. Consequently, the limited range of exit options restricts the discretion of the frontline workers, which results in locking claimants with complex problems into temporary benefit. Their attention tends to be drawn to concerns that are likely to be unintended, which are to keep claimants’ income safe and to secure a smooth workflow within the office as well as to smooth benefit transactions. The context of a generous welfare state with a strongly rights-based benefit scheme is regarded as a likely contributor to these concerns.

Victims as Protagonists in Transitional Justice

The notion of ‘justice for victims’ of the most serious crimes has been at the center of the normative developments that we have come to know as transitional justice. Indeed, the social movements that were the engine for this prodigious change in social and state practices and later also in international standards succeeded initially in persuading larger circles of society, and eventually state institutions as well, that newly democratic dispensations could not ignore the plight of the victims of human rights crimes of the recent past. Human rights organizations pleaded to reject oblivion, false ‘reconciliation’ and forgiving and forgetting. Their stand soon became a forceful demand for affirmative measures to ensure that victims, survivors and their families would now be recognized as first-class citizens with specific rights and entitlements. Through decisions of domestic and international tribunals, those policy measures became recognized as treaty-based obligations that the state owes victims, summarized in the objectives of truth, justice, reparations and measures of nonrepetition. Victims and survivors were, of course, present and active at the outset of this remarkable movement. ‘Justice for victims’ might at first have given the impression that those who had been harmed by abuse of state power were to be passive recipients of the benefits of truth seeking, truth telling and reparations. In practice, however, victims and survivors became prominent protagonists of these exercises in public policy measures designed to infuse specific content to the promise that such crimes would ‘never again’ occur. It is for that reason that transitional justice today requires victims’ participation in the design and execution of all programs of truth telling and reparations, and not simply as witnesses or recipients of benefits. Indeed, victims’ active participation is also a requirement for justice in the form of prosecutions. In interpreting modern international law standards, authoritative organs of protection demand that domestic courts and codes of criminal procedure allow for victim participation in the investigation, prosecution and trial of international crimes. The same can be said about measures of nonrepetition: their success in ‘vetting’ institutions and excluding those in them who have abused their power depends to a large extent on the degree to which victims have a say in creating a fair and complete process, including the design of adequate horizontal and vertical controls over those institutions, as well as training and continuing education of their members.

Workfare: conditioning the attitudes of benefit recipients towards social security?

Have increasing levels of conditionality fundamentally changed the attitudes of the unemployed towards social security, work obligations and welfare dependency? Both neopaternalist and governmentalist theorising suggests that workfare policies should have shifted this group's conceptions of self-interest over time yet previous evidence has been rather mixed. This article makes a fresh contribution to the literature by drawing upon New Zealand Election Study data (1990–2014) and New Zealand qualitative data (2007–2008; 2014) to analyse the attitudes of “undeserving” unemployed benefit recipients who are subject to work obligations over 21 yearsandby comparing their attitudes to those of “deserving” benefit recipients not subject to work obligations (the retired and students) and wage/salary earners. It finds a notable hardening of unemployed people's attitudes towards some welfare dependency propositions over time and evidence of “self-governing rationalities” being adopted by some unemployed individuals but, overall, attitudes amongst this group remain nuanced and ambivalent.

Econometric Evaluation of a Placement Coaching Program for Recipients of Disability Insurance Benefits in Switzerland

This paper evaluates a placement coaching program implemented in Zurich during 2009-2013 that focused on the reemployment of persons drawing disability insurance (DI) benefits. A private company was commissioned to implement the program. Kernel-based matching and radius matching with bias adjustment estimators combined with difference-in-differences are applied to administrative panel data. The estimates point to a successful project in terms of a reduction in DI benefits and an increase in income even in the medium-run. A simple cost-benefit analysis suggests that the project was a profitable investment for the social security system. Sensitivity analyses indicate that the results are robust to confounders and further specification issues. An interesting policy implication is that it seems possible to enhance the employment prospects of disabled persons with a relatively inexpensive intervention which does not include any explicit investments in human capital.

Do Welfare Dependent Neighbors Matter for Individual Welfare Dependency?

This paper investigates neighborhood peer effects on individual welfare using a combined IV and control function approach. The empirical analysis is based on panel data for the years 2007-2010 constructed by enriching the geo-referenced version of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) with aggregated zip code level-information. The results suggest that individual welfare use is positively correlated with neighborhood social benefit recipient rates, i.e. an increase in the share of neighborhood peers on social benefit by 1 percentage point raises the individual probability of welfare use by 0.97 percentage points.

Income Support, (Un-)Employment and Well-Being

Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the nonpecuniary life satisfaction effects of in-work benefits. Our empirical strategy combines difference-in-difference designs with synthetic control groups to analyze transitions of workers between unemployment, regular employment and employment accompanied by welfare receipt. Working makes people generally better off than being unemployed, but employed welfare recipients do not reach the life satisfaction level of regular employees. This implies that welfare receipt entails non-compliance with the norm to make one’s own living. Our findings allow us to draw cautious conclusions on employment subsidies paid as welfare benefits.

Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences

The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that these variations—largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution—reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity. When progressivity is high, politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who gets what intensify. When progressivity is low, and tax contributors and benefit recipients overlap, redistributive struggles become politically less salient. We test these predictions both across nations and across policy domains within a sample of advanced industrial democracies. Our findings indicate that the progressivity of the tax and transfer system is a major determinant of the predictive power of income on preferences for redistribution.

Development of Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Programs in Urban China: An Empirical Analysis Based on 31 Regions Over 2003-2013

The Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (MLG) system is functioned as the last resort safety net for China’s urban poor people and plays a substantial role in poverty reduction. Over the past few years, reforms have been taken to increase the benefit levels and to provide minimum income protection for households which are most vulnerable to poverty. However, so far little is known about how the urban MLG system has developed across regions and how the regional differences have changed over time. Since the administration of the MLG system in China is decentralized, regional differences help us to understand the effectiveness of the MLG system in poverty alleviation. Therefore, this paper provides new empirical insights into the MLG development across 31 regions in urban China between 2003 and 2013. In addition to the widely used indicators like benefit levels and number of benefit recipients, we construct the indicators of MLG replacement rates to measure the generosity of the benefits in relation to income from work. The results show that first, the development of the urban MLG system in China has followed different tracks before and after 2008. Since 2008, the governments have made great efforts to increase the generosity of the MLG system while put more stringent conditions on MLG beneficiaries. Consequently, the MLG standards increased significantly while MLG recipients decreased enormously. Second, the development of the urban MLG programs varies considerably across regions. However, China has shown convergence of the generosity levels of the MLG programs across regions since 2008.