Social Policy Choices Research Articles

Elasticity of environmental, social, sustainable and management stocks: an analysis of market breakdown, technology and growth while COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent eradication precipitated a rare and unexpected stock market crash. Consequently, the crisis presents a unique chance to evaluate Environmental, Social, Sustainable, and Management (ESSM) policy choices. The contribution of this study is to demonstrate the application of the investment horizon of ESSM concerns and investment decisions, technology and growth and shows the significance of the long-term perspective in ESSM investment decision making. During the period of January 2020 to December 2021, stocks with higher ESSM ratings had significantly greater returns, less return arbitrariness, and bigger operational profit margins. ESSM ventures with more advertising expenditures had higher stock returns, but investors with a greater predisposition for ESSM saw less return arbitrariness during market crises. This study emphasizes the importance of investor and consumer loyalty to the elasticity of ESSM stocks.

How Financial Resilience Shapes Social and Public Health Policy Choices in Africa: Empirical Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

How Financial Resilience Shapes Social and Public Health Policy Choices in Africa: Empirical Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Everyday sense making and the discursive delineation of social policy space in Zambia

AbstractThis article connects the notions of policy space and social contract in order to understand the importance of everyday discourse for the perceived legitimacy of social policy choices and emerging responsibilities in Zambia. Based on a Grounded Theory analysis of interview and document material, the article reconstructs common sense ideas about the limited resources of the state, from which modalities in the Social Cash Transfer programme, especially the requirements for targeting and graduation, are derived. It moreover explores how from these limited means also follows the sharing of responsibilities between the state and the recipients themselves, giving way to a self‐responsibility discourse. Thereby, the attempt by implementing officers and the wider community to rationalise distributional choices in light of wide‐spread poverty, shape the social contract between the state and citizens in Zambia and ultimately also delineate the space of what becomes possible to imagine within social policy. The article concludes with an argument for broadening social policy visions away from the individual level towards tackling the underlying structural causes of poverty by connecting social with economic interventions.

Crisis Narratives and the African Paradox: African Informal Economies, COVID‐19 and the Decolonization of Social Policy

This article challenges the role of COVID-19 crisis narratives in shaping social policy choices in Africa. The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on Africa's vast informal economies, both as a symbol of the continent's intense vulnerability to the ravages of the pandemic, and as a puzzle in the face of the uneven and limited effects of COVID-19 across the continent. Indeed, an examination of statistical and documentary evidence reveals an inverse relationship between COVID-19 fatalities and the size of African informal economies, and a perverse relationship between best-practice COVID social protection responses and levels of COVID-19 mortality. Scrutinizing the evidence behind African COVID-19 crisis narratives raises questions about the ability of donor-led digitized social protection paradigms to address social needs in highly informalized, low-resource environments. This article highlights the role of crisis narratives as an exercise of power geared to remastering, homogenizing and reimagining African informal economies in ways that facilitate particular types of development intervention, sidelining alternative, more socially grounded policy perspectives. Through a closer examination of historical and contemporary realities in Africa's vast and varied informal economies, the article highlights the need to decolonize social policy by privileging local needs and policy perspectives over global policy agendas in the interest of transformative rather than palliative policy responses.

Impact on the NHS and health of the UK's trade and cooperation relationship with the EU, and beyond.

The UK's relationship with the European Union (EU) is now embodied in two principal legal instruments: the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which formally entered into force on 1 May 2021; and the Withdrawal Agreement, with its Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, which continues to apply. Using a 'building blocks' framework for analysis of national health systems derived from the World Health Organisation, this article examines the likely impacts in the UK of this legal settlement on the National Health Service (NHS), health and social care. Specifically, we determine the extent to which the trade, cooperation and regulatory aspects of those legal measures support positive impacts for the NHS and social care. We show that, as there is clear support for positive health and care outcomes in only one of the 17 NHS 'building blocks', unless mitigating action is taken, the likely outcomes will be detrimental. However, as the legal settlement gives the UK a great deal of regulatory freedom, especially in Great Britain, we argue that it is crucial to track the effects of proposed new health and social care-related policy choices in the months and years ahead.

Policy instrument choice under globalization: Do authoritarian states choose differently?

• New data show policy convergence among 15 ex-Soviet states in childcare deinstitutionalization. • Countries adopted policies as ‘a package’ (goals + instruments), as promoted by international actors. • Authoritarian states adopted the same policy instruments, as non-authoritarian states. • Authoritarian states adopted ‘modern’, non-coercive policy instruments, based on the agentic individual. • World culture and international advocacy appear key to childcare policy instrument choice. Do authoritarian states differ from non-authoritarian ones in their social policy choices? The paper presents new data on childcare deinstitutionalization policies in 15 ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The data suggest significant convergence among countries in the adoption of both deinstitutionalization policy ‘ends’ and ‘means’, despite drastic differences in political regimes. In particular, I trace the adoption of several instruments, which have been actively promoted by international organizations (e.g., foster care, case management, downsizing of institutions, etc.). The data suggest that authoritarian states in the ex-Soviet region do not differ from non-authoritarian governments in their deinstitutionalization instrument choices, suggesting that political regime is not always a major policy determinant. The results are significant because they show that authoritarian regimes can also select modern, non-coercive instruments for childcare deinstitutionalization, which are underpinned by the idea of agentic actors and the centrality of the individual.

Privacy and Emergency Payments in a Pandemic: How to Think about Privacy and a Central Bank Digital Currency

The economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many governments to provide emergency payments to citizens. These one-off and recurring payments revealed the shortcomings of existing financial infrastructures even as electronic payments replaced cash for everyday expenses. Delays in getting government payments to citizens in many countries focused attention on the potential benefits of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). This article outlines the social and economic policy choices involved in designing a CBDC and the consequences of these choices for privacy. Priorities including preventing the criminal abuse of the financial system, geopolitical concerns and private sector innovation compete with, and potentially undermine, privacy. We identify and categorize four key privacy risks as ‘losses’ associated with current CBDC models: loss of anonymity, loss of liberty, loss of individual control, and loss of regulatory control.

The rise and fall of a social democratic economic and social policy alternative in the ANC (1990–1996)

ABSTRACT This article re-examines existing interpretations of the ANC's economic and social policy choices during the negotiations that led to South Africa's democracy. The divergence but also convergence crucially in economic policy thinking of key policy actors within the ANC and the National Party (NP) led apartheid regime is contrasted. The National Party's economic policy agenda is discussed with attention to its key ‘technocratic’ policy actors and how they influentially negotiated neo-liberal policy positions with the ANC. The economic and social policies of the ANC must be seen in contrast as part of a series of attempts historically at advocating social democratic oriented policies. The ANC leadership however marginalised and abandoned these ideas and policies in a social democratic vein in the consensus seeking transition era. The paper tries to explain these shifts and to come to grips with the complexity of the actors, history and politics of ANC policy thinking in the transition era.

How Financial Resilience Affects Social and Public Health Policy Choices in Sub-Saharan Africa: Empirical Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objective: Scant evidence exists of how governments in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries consider the economic vulnerability of their populaces when instituting initial social control policies. This study examined possible clusters of financial resilience among SSA countries and how these clusters predicted the length of social control policies. Methods: We harmonized country-level financial resilience data from the World Bank’s 2019 Global Findex database, data on COVID-19 cases from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and social control data from governments’ press releases. Multivariate cluster analysis and geographically weighted regression (GWR) were used to assess the level of savings, domestic remittance, self-employment, wages, emergency funds, and agricultural income – all predictors of financial resilience. Results: We found two clusters of financial resilience: 41% of countries were financially resilient, while 59% were not. We also found that financial resilience profiles were predictive of longer durations of initial social control policies, but in varying directions and in degrees depending on the country. Conclusion: The study sheds light on the heterogeneity of financial resilience among SSA countries and extends our knowledge of financial resilience, vis-a-vis pandemic responses. Social protection programs must be developed and implemented to help populaces cope during and after the pandemic.

UNCITRAL, security rights and the globalisation of the US Article 9

This article provides a critical analysis of the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) proposals for developing – through its Legislative Guide (the Guide) – a 'liberal' global secured credit law regime that opens up the range of assets that can be used for securing loans and that limits formal procedures required for taking security interests. The article argues that UNCITRAL’s reliance on Article 9 of the US Uniform Commercial Code is problematic for various reasons. First, it neglects reference to indigenous secured credit law norms that also reflect national social policy choices in a range of countries. Second, it questions the idea that global 'liberal' secured credit law of the kind articulated in the Guide helps to achieve 'economic efficiency', since it relies on a narrow conception of private property. Moreover, by relying on existing property rights distributions, a liberal secured credit law can further entrench existing socio-economic disparities in a society. The article therefore casts doubt on the idea that UNCITRAL’s Legislative Guide is an example of a successful 'harmonized, modernized and marketized' secured credit law, and instead – in Polanyian terms – draws attention to its potential to further disembed markets in credit out of social relationships.

The Liberal Case Against the Modern Class Action

Professor Brian Fitzpatrick has recently written a provocative book, seeking to make the conservative case for class actions. In this essay, the author makes the liberal case against the modern class action. “Liberalism” is defined here as a process-based theory that requires constitutionally valid social policy choices to be made by those who are representative of and accountable to the electorate. It chooses this over the more popular substantive-based form of modern liberalism, because it finds adherence to the democratic process as a necessary condition for liberalism; the concept of “fascist liberalism” is oxymoronic. On the basis of this premise, the essay finds certain types of modern class actions to be fundamentally inconsistent with process-based liberalism. Where individual class member claims are so small that, as a practical matter, most claims will not be paid, and this is clear from the outset of the case, the class action undermines the foundations of controlling substantive law. It does so by ignoring the remedial element in the law being enforced: compensation to victims. And it does so not through transparent alteration in controlling substantive law, but rather through a kind of procedural process of alchemy that transforms a compensatory statute magically into a form of civil fine or qui tam action. A suit does not arise under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Rather, it arises under the underlying substantive law being enforced, and in these “faux” class actions, the procedural rule impermissibly transforms the substantive DNA of the law being enforced. In so doing it threatens to undermine the operation of representative democracy, which itself constitutes a foundational element of liberal political philosophy.

(In)equality and the South African Constitution

ABSTRACTDoes the South African Constitution constrain or empower government, courts and citizens in addressing systemic social and economic inequalities? This article argues that the Constitution is explicitly ‘transformative’, but is an enabling document, providing ‘scaffolding’ for political and legal activities. It is government, strong institutions and civil society that are ultimately responsible for securing its equality aspirations. Here the Constitution admits of different understandings of equality and different economic and social policy choices. This article identifies these contested meanings of equality and suggests that a liberal egalitarian/social democratic version is dominant in policy choices and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. It illustrates this with reference to the Court’s jurisprudence on equality, and suggests that more radical and transformative interpretations remain possible. However, it concludes that we cannot escape politics, the need for good policy choices and effective implementation and enforcement.

Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization: How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis

Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization: How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis

Alexander Horn (2017) Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization: How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, €95.00, pp. 284, hbk.

Alexander Horn (2017) Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization: How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, €95.00, pp. 284, hbk. - Volume 48 Issue 1

Horn, Alexander. 2017. Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization – How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis

Horn, Alexander. 2017. Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization – How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis

Social transfers and conditionalities under different regime types

This paper examines the implications of political factors for social policy choices. Specifically, we explore the link between regime type and adoption of unconditional transfers versus transfers conditioned on beneficiaries’ investments in human capital. Due to the direct nature of benefits, unconditional transfers are more likely to be used to buy off opposition and prevent social unrest. As transfers that are conditioned on education and health pay off only in a relatively distant future, they are rarely initiated for political motives and rather defined by interests of long-term development and human capital accumulation. Using the new dataset on Non-Contributory Social Transfer Programs (NSTP) in developing countries, we find that transfers are indeed chosen so as to be unconditional under less democratic regimes. There is some evidence that conditional transfers are more likely to be adopted in democracies. In particular, democracies tend to increase the number of conditional schemes once any social transfer program is introduced.

Changes to Economic and Monetary Union and Their Effects on Social Policy

This article argues that the way fiscal and economic integration is pursued within EU Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has changed since the Euro area crisis, resulting in a higher degree of interference with national social policy choices and a resurgence of the so-called social deficit. In view of the situation, attempts have been made to take social policy into account within the new EMU framework for economic and fiscal monitoring. The article argues that while these reforms constitute an improvement, they are not enough to address the post-crisis social deficit. This question does not have an easy solution, and ensuring an optimal fit between economic and fiscal integration and social policy is one of the greatest challenges facing the EU. Ensuring an optimal fit is necessary to make EMU sustainable, as well as to ensure legitimacy and support for the European project. The final section of the article provides concluding reflections and an overview of the proposals currently on the table.

Non-Contributory Social Transfer Programmes in Developing Countries: A New Data Set and Research Agenda

Social transfer programmes in developing countries are designed to contribute to poverty reduction by increasing the income of the poor in order to ensure minimal living standards. In addition, social transfers provide a safety net for the vulnerable, who are typically not covered by contributory social security. The question of how effective such programmes are in achieving these aims has been the subject of numerous impact evaluations. However, the optimal design of such programmes is still unclear. Even less is known about whether the adoption and implementation of transfer programmes is really driven by poverty and neediness or whether other factors also have an influence. To investigate these and other research questions, we have developed a new data set entitled Non‐Contributory Social Transfer Programmes (NSTP) in Developing Countries. One advantage of this data set is that it traces 186 non‐contributory programmes from 101 countries back in time and presents them in panel form for the period up until 2015. The second advantage is that it contains all the details regarding the various programmes’ designs as well as information on costs and coverage in a coded format and thus facilitates both comparative quantitative and in-depth qualitative analyses. While describing the data we discuss a number of examples of how the data set can be used to explore different issues related to social policies in developing countries. We present suggestive evidence that the adoption of social transfer programmes is not based only on pro‐poor motives, but rather that social policy choices differ between political regimes.

Economic Reasoning and Social Policy

Abstract There is growing consensus that in the 21 st century, broad based economic growth with social harmony would be difficult to pursue without progress in social development. This paper focuses on how incorporating economic reasoning in social policy analysis and discussions could assist in improving design, implementation, and assessment of social programs and schemes. Such incorporation could contribute to better societal outcomes and effectiveness of social policies. The paper provides three inter-related frameworks, for thinking about household welfare, for generating fiscal space, and for diagnosing overall economic growth, or for sector specific constraints, which could be applied to specific contexts of social policy. Their application could assist in pursuing social policies in a more systemic and integrated manner, with requisite understanding of the trade-offs involved in social policy choices. Key words: social policy, economic reasoning, household welfare, fiscal space, growth diagnostics

Welfare Attitudes of Singaporeans – Ambiguity in Shifting Socio‐political Dynamics

AbstractThis article presents findings from a survey of 440 Singaporeans on their attitudes towards welfare and welfare recipients. Attitudes were generally favourable, but sentiments towards higher taxes to help the poor were ambivalent. Controlled for demographic characteristics, ‘poverty sympathizers’ and affiliates of opposition political parties held the most liberal views, but were not more willing to pay higher taxes. Instead, poor respondents on the one hand and highly educated respondents on the other hand were more willing to pay higher taxes. Knowledge accumulation and beliefs about causes of poverty were strong predictors of attitudes. Effects of personal values and self‐interest were less evident. Couched against the backdrop of an economy that has experienced rapid transformation and one of the widest income inequality in the developed world, the article discusses the critical juncture of social response and policy choices that Singapore finds itself.