Social Safety Net Policies Research Articles

Changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic on postpartum screening results in Ontario, Canada: The healthy babies healthy children screening tool.

Research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mothers/childbearing parents has mainly been cross-sectional and focused on psychological symptoms. This study examined the impact on function using ongoing, systematic screening of a representative Ontario sample. An interrupted time series analysis of repeated cross-sectional data from a province-wide screening program using the Healthy Babies Healthy Children (HBHC) tool assessed changes associated with the pandemic at the time of postpartum discharge from hospital. Postal codes were used to link to neighborhood-level data. The ability to parent or care for the baby/child and other psychosocial and behavioral outcomes were assessed. The co-primary outcomes of inability to parent or care for the baby/child were infrequently observed in the pre-pandemic (March 9, 2019-March 15, 2020) and initial pandemic periods (March 16, 2020-March 23, 2021) (parent 209/63,006 (0.33%)-177/56,117 (0.32%), care 537/62,955 (0.85%)-324/56,086 (0.58%)). Changes after pandemic onset were not observed for either outcome although a significant (p = 0.02) increase in slope was observed for inability to parent (with questionable clinical significance). For secondary outcomes, worsening was only seen for reported complications during labor/delivery. Significant improvements were observed in the likelihood of being unable to identify a support person to assist with care, need of newcomer support, and concerns about money over time. There were no substantive changes in concerns about ability to parent or care for children. Adverse impacts of the pandemic may have been mitigated by accommodations for remote work and social safety net policies.

Implementation Of Social Safety Net Policies For Vulnerable Groups

This study aims to analyze social safety net policies for vulnerable groups in the face of an economic downturn due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They are also analyzing whether policies during a pandemic can protect vulnerable workers. Data collection is done by literature study and secondary data. The research results show that social safety net policies during the pandemic were still unable to save the people's economy fully. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several social safety net programs presented new problems at the implementation level, especially at the grassroots level. Some problems that arise are the uneven distribution of aid distribution, uncertainty of procedures and requirements for receiving assistance, data on target recipients that are not up-to-date, emergency conditions of residents who need them but are not registered, and problems of informal sector workers who are migrants. The government needs to review the social safety net policy and improve poverty data to be integrated

Socioeconomic vulnerability and climate risk in coastal Virginia

Coastal Virginia, a region with economic and strategic significance at the state and national level, has been experiencing the highest sea-level rise (SLR) on the Atlantic coast of the United States. This has been accompanied by a variety of climate hazards such as flooding and more frequent storms, initiating adaptation planning and decision-making on multiple governance levels. A spatial understanding of climate risk and its associations with socioeconomic vulnerabilities raises essential questions about the underlying roots of such associations and can help local governments prioritize social vulnerabilities in their adaptation efforts. Using coastal flooding as a climate stressor in this region, this paper conducts analyses that strive to help policymakers more effectively utilize social vulnerability in adaptation planning. The analysis reveals significant associations between climate risk, represented by flood risk, and social vulnerability measures such as poverty, access to infrastructure, education, and housing in certain parts of coastal Virginia. The paper then discusses how associations between vulnerability and climate risk in the region could influence policymaking on the local and state level. This research presents several empirical relationships that raise important questions regarding the drivers of social equity in the face of climate adaptation in coastal Virginia. The methodology developed in this study may be modified to assess social equity in climate adaptation in other coastal communities in the United States and possibly other countries. Such modification can help to illuminate the associations between location-specific social vulnerabilities, such as social safety net policies, and climate risks.

Household Shocks and Consumption Smoothing: Evidence from Northern Bangladesh

Poor households in rural Bangladesh often face concurring idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, which have adverse impacts on their income and consumption. In this study, we investigate the transmission channels, coping responses, and economic consequences of different shocks including idiosyncratic adverse health events and aggregate agricultural productivity shocks. We use a balanced panel data of 5,655 rural households–interviewed every year between 2010 and 2013–in northern Bangladesh. We estimate the effects of adverse health shocks on the consumption levels of poor households in a multi-shock framework. We take advantage of the panel data and use fixed effect models to control for unobserved household-level confounders and potential endogeneity. We further examine effects of shocks to agricultural wages on consumption using rainfall as an instrument. We further carry out a number of robustness checks to understand how sensitive our models are to different alternate specifications. Results indicate that households smooth their consumption after experiencing adverse health shocks, with and without the parallel incidence of other types of shocks. Consumption smoothing occurs despite households experiencing a significant decrease of wage income, which appears to be driven by an increase in informal loans from money lenders and households' social networks. To evaluate the effect of a different type of income shock on consumption, we use rainfall as an exogenous instrument for agricultural income. Results indicate that while higher rainfall leads to a significant increase in agricultural income, it does not translate to higher food expenditure for households. Together, these findings offer suggestive evidence that, in this setting, households appear to smooth food consumption in the face of income shocks. Poor households rely on formal and informal, potentially costly channels and exploit existing social networks to insure themselves against adverse shocks. The findings highlight the importance of developing a better framework to evaluate and implement more equitable social safety net policies.

Predictors of Public Support for Social Safety Net Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

IntroductionU.S. residents had varying experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and social safety net policy in 2020. Past research has suggested that partisanship, ideology, racial attitudes, and personal experience may each influence policy attitudes. In this study, we explore whether variation in support for social safety net policy in 2020 is predicted by negative experiences of the pandemic when controlling for racial attitudes, partisanship, and ideology.MethodsSupport for 12 social safety net policies in 2020 was estimated using data from a nationally representative panel survey of U.S. adults conducted in 2020 (n=1,222). Logistic regression was used to examine differences in the predicted probability of supporting a majority of social safety net policies related to health, housing, and employment by partisanship, ideology, racial attitudes, and negative experiences of the pandemic. Analyses were conducted in 2021.ResultsHigher levels of symbolic racism was a consistently strong predictor of lower social safety net policy support across health, housing, and employment policies; as was identifying as either Conservative or Republican. Negative experiences of the pandemic were generally unpredictive of support for the social safety net policy.ConclusionsDespite the pandemic's consequences as well as the potential for social safety net policy to address these consequences, negative experiences of the pandemic failed to predict policy support, even as racial attitudes, partisanship, and ideology strongly predicted these preferences in 2020. Building public support for social safety net policy requires communication strategies that identify the shared benefits of these policies.

Public support for U.S. social safety net policies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has stretched the U.S. social safety net and prompted federal legislation designed to ameliorate the pandemic's health and economic impacts. We surveyed a nationally representative cohort of 1222 U.S. adults in April 2020 and November 2020 to evaluate changes in public opinion about 11 social safety net policies and the role of government over the course of the pandemic. A majority of U.S. adults supported six policies at both time points, including policies guaranteeing two weeks of paid sick leave; enacting universal health insurance; increasing the federal minimum wage; and increasing government spending on construction projects, business tax credits, and employment education and training. From April to November 2020, public support was stable for nine of the 11 policies but declined nearly 10 percentage points for policies guaranteeing two weeks paid sick leave (from 76% support in April 2020 to 67% support in November 2020) and extending unemployment insurance benefits (51% to 42%). Declines in support for these two policies were concentrated among those with higher incomes, more education, in better health status, the employed, and those with health insurance. The share of respondents believing in a strong role of government also declined from 33% in April to 26% in November 2020 (p > 0.05). Despite these shifts, we observed consistent majority support for several policies enacted during the pandemic, including guaranteeing paid sick leave and business tax credits, as well as employment-related policies.

Associations Among Select State Policies and the Nutritional Quality of Household Packaged Food Purchases in the United States from 2008 Through 2017

BackgroundPolicy interventions are important public health tools because they can reach large numbers of people. State context has been associated with health outcomes, yet few studies have examined the extent to which state-level policies are associated with dietary quality. ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to evaluate whether state policies are associated with the nutritional quality of household packaged food purchases. DesignThis observational study used data from Nielsen Homescan, an open-cohort household panel where participants track purchases, and a combination of state-level food and social safety net policy variables from 2008 through 2017. Participants and settingThis study included 615,634 household-year observations in the United States from 2008 through 2017. Household-year observations were excluded in the case that a household did not make a minimum number of purchases and in the case that they had incorrect geographic information. The final analytic sample was 611,719 household-years. Main outcome measuresStudy outcomes included a set of nutrition-related measures of public health interest, including nutrients of concern (eg, sugar, saturated fat, and sodium) and calories from specific food groups (eg, fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, processed meats, mixed dishes, sugar-sweetened beverages, and desserts and snacks). Statistical analysisThis study used multilevel generalized linear models with state fixed effects on three samples: all households, only households with low income, and only households with low educational attainment. ResultsFew significant associations were found between healthy food retail policies and the nutritional quality of purchases, and mixed associations were found between social safety net policies and lower or higher quality packaged food purchases. ConclusionsLittle evidence was found that state policy context in 2008 through 2017 was associated with the quality of packaged food purchases. However, variation in state policies is increasing over time, warranting future research into the relationship between these policies, the quality of packaged food purchases, and the rest of the diet.

Gender, Space, and Precarious Employment in Canada

AbstractThis study aims to examine how gendered precariousness is spatially patterned across Canada's landscape using Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey. We compare gender differences in distinct precarious forms of employment (PFEs) across a range of geographies, including national, provincial, census metropolitan areas, and urban/rural areas. We find that distinct spatial patterns and degree of gendered precariousness were evident within and across geographic spaces. Logit models further confirmed the robustness of gender differences in PFEs across space, revealing that PFEs were associated with gender, immigration status, age, type of economic family, education, income, and occupation. This study has implications for further understanding the causal factors at play in producing these uneven economic geographies. In terms of policy recommendations, this study calls for greater gender equity in social safety net policies, especially in the wake of the labor market shocks brought by the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Addressing Social Needs in Health Care Settings: Evidence, Challenges, and Opportunities for Public Health.

There has been an explosion of interest in addressing social needs in health care settings. Some efforts, such as screening patients for social needs and connecting them to needed social services, are already in widespread practice. These and other major investments from the health care sector hint at the potential for new multisector collaborations to address social determinants of health and individual social needs. This article discusses the rapidly growing body of research describing the links between social needs and health and the impact of social needs interventions on health improvement, utilization, and costs. We also identify gaps in the knowledge base and implementation challenges to be overcome. We conclude that complementary partnerships among the health care, public health, and social services sectors can build on current momentum to strengthen social safety net policies, modernize social services, and reshape resource allocation to address social determinants of health.

Too many Stages, Too Little Time: Bureaucratization and Potential Impasse in the Social Safety Net Program in Indonesia

Since its first announcement in March 2020, the number of positive confirmed patients as well as patients under surveillance has increased exponentially. Recognizing the impact of Covid-19 on the poor, the government reallocated expenditure budget by increasing the amount of aid to the community. This paper focuses on social safety net policies, mainly in two programs: the Hope Family Program and the Sembako Program. Both of these aids are actually not any new programs, as they have been around since 2017, but the Covid-19 pandemic is adding to the economic burden of the household so that both of these aids are then increased in amount. Specifically, this paper focuses on two things. First , how the social safety net policy must be implemented according to the rules. Second , mapping the potential impasse that arises from the complexity of the policy itself. It is undeniable that the problem of bureaucratization always comes up more in every policy, with no exception for this social aid policy. By mapping out potential obstacles, this paper can provide a number of key solutions for resolving obstacles in the field.

The Social Safety Net After Welfare Reform: Recent Developments and Consequences for Household Dynamics

The remarkable transformation of the American social safety net that began in the early 1990s has led to seismic shifts in who benefits and how. More than two decades later, how should these changes be judged? Expanding and updating prior influential reviews, we evaluate how the transformation of the safety net—broadly defined—has shaped economic and family dynamics within low-income households. Collectively, social safety net policies have expanded support for working poor parents quite dramatically, while the cash safety net for the nonworking poor has all but collapsed. Working poor families have come out ahead economically, with mounting evidence of positive long-term benefits for child health and development. At the same time, a substantial number of poor families have fallen through the cracks, disconnected from stable, adequate wage income and cash aid. A growing number report income so low that it can be tracked with indicators used to measure poverty in the developing world. Meanwhile, contrary to reformers’ predictions, these changes have had little effect on marriage or unwed births. We call for a reinvigorated focus on the continued evolution of the social safety net and discuss ways in which a sociological perspective can enhance such work.

Welfare mothers’ grassroots activism for economic justice

ABSTRACTSeveral events during the course of this research – including the Great Recession, Barack Obama’s election and presidency, and the Occupy and student protests – increasingly focused media attention and public interest on social justice and economic inequality. Given the 2016 US elections interest continued to grow on these topics and sparked new attention to the role of organising and activism on social policy issues such as on health care, the economic conditions of working families, access to higher education, and the deteriorating social safety net. Through ethnographic research in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper examines how mothers who pursued higher education while on welfare engaged in grassroots activism to reform social safety net policies. This project explores how they became grassroots activists, how they developed an oppositional consciousness and participated in grassroots anti-poverty activism, and the consequences of that participation.

Do Social Safety Net Policies Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? Understanding Perception of State Philosophy in Swimming across the Tide

Bangladesh is a populated country and most of the people live below the poverty line. After the independence of Bangladesh in 1980s safety net programmes has been adopted to reduce poverty from Bangladesh. At present 30 social safety net programmes are now operation in Bangladesh. The objective of the study is to find challenges ahead to implement Social Safety Net (SSN) programmes that initiated to reduce poverty at rural areas specially. The article is based on content analysis method and secondary data has been used to conduct the study. The study found that there is various weakness in social safety net policies. There is lack of integration and coordination among different safety net programmes and providers. Political stability is one of the great obstacle to fulfill the ultimate goal of safety net programmes. The extent, nature and mechanism of safety net programs change with the change of government. Besides this, corruption, shortage of budget etc hinder the implementation of safety net programmes. However, high political commitment, increase allocation, better targeting beneficiary, involvement of NGOs, civil society, monitoring and overseeing, reduction of corruption should be ensured.

Do Social Safety Net Policies Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? Understanding Perception of State Philosophy in Swimming across the Tide

Do Social Safety Net Policies Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? Understanding Perception of State Philosophy in Swimming across the Tide

How Social Safety Net Programs Affect Family Economic Well‐Being, Family Functioning, and Children's Development

AbstractFollowing changes to federal cash assistance programs in 1996, low‐income families now rely on a set of social programs: the Earned Income Tax Credit, food assistance, publicly funded health insurance, and child‐care subsidies. In this review, we present evidence on the effects of these programs on families' economic circumstances, families' psychological well‐being and functioning, and children's developmental outcomes. Social safety net programs improve families' economic circumstances, thereby achieving their primary goal. Few studies have examined impacts on children's developmental outcomes but overall, programs improve children's academic, behavioral, and physical well‐being. Even fewer studies have examined impacts on parents' psychological well‐being or family functioning, leaving gaps in the literature. The review concludes with discussions of the Great Recession and whether effects found during stronger economic times generalize to the most recent economic crisis, and with a discussion of social safety net policies in countries outside the United States.

IMF Structural Conditionality: How Much Is Too Much?

As suggested above, an active debate has long been underway - and has intensified in the wake of the Asian crisis - about the appropriate scope and intrusiveness of IMF policy conditionality. In this paper, I take up one key element of that debate, namely, the role of policies in IMF-supported adjustment programs. By structural policies, I mean policies aimed not at the management of aggregate demand but rather at either improving the efficiency of resource use and/or increasing the economy's productive capacity. Structural policies are usually aimed at reducing/dismantling government - imposed distortions or putting in place various institutional features of a modern market economy. Such policies include, inter alia: financial-sector policies; liberalization of trade, capital markets, and of the exchange rate system; privatization and public enterprise policies; tax and expenditure policies (apart from the overall fiscal stance); labor market policies; pricing and marketing policies; transparency and disclosure policies; poverty-reduction and social safety-net policies; pension policies; corporate governance policies (including anti-corruption measures); and environmental policies. To set the stage for what follows, it is worth summarizing the main concerns and criticisms that have been expressed about the IMF's existing approach to policy conditionality. These typically take one or more of the following forms. First, there is a worry that wide-ranging and micro-managed policy recommendations will be viewed by developing-country borrowers as so costly and intrusive as to discourage unduly the demand for Fund assistance during crises. Even though the cost of borrowing from the Fund (the so-called rate of charge) is much lower than the cost of borrowing from private creditors - particularly during times of stress - we observe that developing countries usually come to the Fund late in the day when their balance-of-payments problems are already severe. This suggests that developing countries place a non-trivial shadow price on the policy conditions associated with Fund borrowing. The concern is that if these conditions become too onerous, emerging economies will wait even longer to come to the Fund (as Thailand did in 1997) and/or will turn to regional official crisis lenders that offer easier policy conditionality (e.g., in 1998 Malaysia was one of the first beneficiaries of low-conditionality Miyazawa Initiative funds, and Asian countries could eventually decide to elevate the infant Chiang-Mai swap arrangements into a full-fledged Asian Monetary Fund). The outcome - so the argument goes - would then be even more difficult initial crisis conditions, greater resort to the anti-social behavior that the Fund was established to prevent, and a tendency toward Gresham's Law of conditionality (where weak regional conditionality would drive out not only the unnecessary but also the necessary elements of Fund conditionality).

Social Safety Net Policies in Indonesia: Objectives and Shortcomings

When the economic crisis hit Indonesia in 1998, concerns over its social impacts were high. As a response, the government within a relatively brief period formulated its social safety net policies. This article evaluates the policies from several key broad aspects such as targets and objectives, implementation, and sustainability. findings suggest that weak economic indicators to measure the social impacts of the crisis had seriously undermined the effectiveness of the policies. In addition, poor implementation of the programmes often reflected weak administrative capabilities of the government. Unless the impediments are addressed, the programmes will remain marginalized. I. Introduction The crisis came at the peaceful time. It had resulted in unrivaled suffering, which had exceptional social and political consequences. It toppled the government and revolutionized the role of government in many nations. legitimacy of existing government was widely questioned. banking situation was catastrophic. Morale was shattered and fear was nation-wide. above paragraph is taken from Hill & Quaile (1998) and Enzler (1939), describing conditions found in various countries during the Great Depression in 1930s. Ironically, when the economic crisis took a turn for the worst in early 1998, similar descriptions were often used to illustrate conditions in Indonesia. Decades of impressive records of economic indicators were no longer things to be taken for granted. Instead, unpredictable swings in the value of local currency and in the index of the capital market were regularly reported, reflecting degrees of uncertainties in the economic fronts. As in Thailand and South Korea, a series of IMF bailout programmes were considered in Indonesia. Initiatives for structural reforms were followed and supposed to provide much-needed remedies. Unlike South Korea and Thailand, however, the economic crisis in Indonesia was a triggering point for an unprecedented socio-political crisis, the worst since 1965.1 By the second quarter of 1998, marked by the May 1998 riots in Jakarta and a few other cities in Indonesia, it was clear that the country had to address both social and economic crises simultaneously. In addition to a number of structural reforms in banking and the corporate sector, socio-economic policy measures in various sectors were announced and implemented. Starting in the 1998/99 fiscal year, the government of Indonesia had launched what is presently known as Jaringan Pengaman Sosial - the Social Safety Net (SSN) programme (hereafter referred to as JPS/SSN). In that first year alone, the JPS/ SSN constituted around 30% of total government expenditure. As in other crisis-effected countries, the programmes were, however, meant to be only temporary, not replacing the long-run programmes on poverty alleviation. Even though it may still be too early to estimate and assess the actual contribution of the JPS/SSN in general, a number of analyses can be drawn from the programme. In this paper we attempt to evaluate the design and the implementation of the programme. Section II briefly reports recent macroeconomic developments in Indonesia. Basic concepts of the social safety programme and an outline of its primary objectives are discussed in Section III. In Section IV, we elaborate on several aspects of the social safety net programmes implemented during the crisis in Indonesia. We provide our evaluation on the programmes in Section V and concluding remarks in Section VI. II. Overview of Recent Macroeconomic Indicators Based on a quarter-to-quarter change, the country's gross domestic product (GDP) showed its first positive growth in the third quarter of 1998 (Table 1). However, a positive year-to-year change in GDP was only reported by the end of the second quarter of 1999. In general, the quarterly GDP values in both 1998 and 1999 were still significantly lowered than its 1997 numbers. …

Human capital, targeting and social safety nets: An analysis of household data from Zimbabwe

This article considers the issue of targeting social services to the poor in developing countries. One important, although often neglected, dimension of poverty is a household's ability to carry out human capital formation. It is argued that defining poverty with reference to human capital has conceptual advantages over the more frequently used income definitions (poverty lines), as well as having practical advantages for policy makers in poor countries. Analysis of an urban household data set from Zimbabwe shows that indicators of some aspects of human capital poverty are strongly correlated with particular household characteristics. The policy conclusions are that policy makers in Zimbabwe could extend the targeted provision of free health services from rural areas to certain wards in urban areas and to urban female headed households and that existing means tested social benefits should take account of household size and composition when setting the income criteria that determine inclusion in the target group. More generally, use of indicators of human capital poverty, or their correlates, as the criteria for inclusions in the target group offers a viable alternative to means testing social benefits in developing countries and they could therefore be used to increase the effectiveness of targeted poverty alleviation and social safety net policies.