Are Lone Mothers Responsive to Policy Changes? Evidence from a Workfare Reform in a Generous Welfare State*

There is a heated debate in many developed countries about how to design a welfare system that moves lone mothers off welfare and into work. We analyze the consequences of a major Norwegian workfare reform of the generous welfare system for lone mothers. The reform imposed work requirements and time limits on welfare receipt, while raising in‐work benefits. Our difference‐in‐differences estimates show that the reform was successful in improving labor‐market participation and in increasing the earnings of lone mothers. However, the reform was associated with income loss and increased poverty among a sizeable subgroup of lone mothers, who were unable to offset the loss of out‐of‐work benefits with gains in earnings.     

Ontology and Feminist Theorizing

There are large research, policy, and economic gaps between the ways US researchers and policy makers address the work/family bind amongst middleclass professionals and poor lone mothers. This is clearly seen in US welfare reform, an important piece of work/family legislation in the 1990s. The new rules make the work/family binds worse for low-income, poor mothers and do not alleviate poverty. With its clear expectation that poor mothers be employed, the legislation opens up new avenues to revamp low-wage work for breadwinners and to socialize the costs of caring for family. Closing the literature gap may help to close the policy gap, which, in turn, would promote more income equality.     

Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Single Female-Headed Families: A Semi-Parametric Analysis

Single female-headed families with children (SFHFwC) have historically been the primary recipients of federal public cash assistance payments in the United States. Recent welfare reform initiatives established work requirements and cumulative time limits on public cash assistance payments. Three findings in this paper have significant implications for the long-term efficacy of welfare reform initiatives. First, SFHFwC made significant and broad-based gains in their economic well-being from 1993 to 1999. Second, increased propensities of single mothers to leave welfare and enter the workforce from 1993 to 1999, behavior consistent with incentives created by welfare reform measures, do not account for a major portion of these observed gains. Third, improved area economic conditions and increased educational levels of single mothers account for a major share of gains in well-being.     

Reassessing welfare reform data: a response to cherry

Abstract

This is a response to Robert Cherry's comment on the article, “Welfare as We [Don't] Know It: A Review and Feminist Critique of Welfare Reform Research” that appeared in the 10(2) issue of Feminist Economics. This response argues that while some combination of welfare reform, the booming economy in the late 1990s, and changes in economic policy all worked together to decrease caseloads and increase employment rates among welfare leavers, these are incomplete measures of the impact of welfare reform on the lives of lone mothers. This paper also argues that the effects of welfare reform on lone mothers are more mixed than Cherry acknowledges. This paper concludes that when one holistically examines low-income lone mothers' lives, it is premature to declare welfare reform a success.     

Welfare Policy and Precarious Lives: “Welfare Reform” Revisited

Abstract:

Although welfare reform has not been one of the most highly visible policy agendas for the Trump administration, restricting access to public assistance programs has been a part of proposals and actions in a number of areas. The Trump administration’s overall approach to welfare reform was articulated formally in 2018 in an Executive Order and a Council of Economic Advisers Report. To provide some context for a discussion of these two documents, the article begins with a discussion of the different meanings of “welfare reform” identified in institutionalist literature, and a brief overview of some important findings on the impacts of the 1996 welfare reform. It then highlights some key aspects of the Trump administration’s approach to welfare reform and responses from the poverty research and advocacy community.     

Assessing welfare reform data: a comment on christopher

Abstract

This paper responds to Karen Christopher's recent Feminist Economics paper that posits that welfare leavers did not benefit much financially during the Clinton-era economic boom. On the contrary, this paper finds that child poverty rates declined dramatically as did material hardships while the situation worsened for only a very small share of mothers. These benefits came as a result of welfare reform rather than simply an outgrowth of the booming economy that enabled a greater share of welfare leavers to find employment and gain sizeable transfer payments compared to the pre-reform time period.     

Lone Mothers: What is to be done?

This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum, ranging from those that seek to enable all lone mothers to take employment to those that aim to let mothers choose whether to take employment or care for their children themselves. Other policies discussed concern ways to value and support caregiving, improve the low-wage labor market for women, and provide a set of income supports that would both boost income and provide time to care for children.     

Measurement of Changes in Economic Welfare in India: 1970–2001

This paper provides time series estimates of measures of economic welfare, inequality, decile class specific true cost of living index and poverty measures based on 20 rounds of National Sample Survey data for the period 1970–2001. It has estimated piece-wise Linear Expenditure System (LES) for very poor, moderately poor, non-poor low and non-poor high expenditure groups for rural as well as urban areas. Money metric utility for deciles are derived from the money metric utility function and social welfare index is constructed by aggregating metric utility of the deciles. Using social welfare index as well as real per capita consumption, the paper analyses the changes in economic welfare over the three decades. Using conventional measures, the paper analyses the changes in poverty and inequality during 1970–2001. The paper also provides estimates of the welfare effects of commodity prices.

     

Welfare rules,business cycles,and employment dynamics among lone parents in Norway

How lone parents combine work and welfare in earning a living has long inspired discussion. Yet little is known of their actual labor market attachment, either over calendar time or during individual lifetimes. In this article we address both issues, first by studying Norwegian Labor Force Surveys to illuminate the labor force participation of lone parents during the last two decades and by comparing the trends revealed with similar developments among married and cohabiting parents. Next, we analyze individual labor market transitions, using longitudinal data from administrative registers. The analyses demonstrate large differences in the labor market behaviors of single and nonsingle parents in Norway, even when controlling for differences in human capital and care responsibilities. Shifting labor demand and welfare reforms that prioritize paid work have both affected the employment of lone parents, but favorable economic conditions seem to have played a larger role than stringent social policies in increasing their employment activity.     

中国债务的福利损失分析

政府债务问题始终是经济学者研究的重要领域,它也为各国政府广泛关注。围绕着巴罗—李嘉图等价定理成立与否展开的最优债务规模引起了经济学者极大的关注,这方面的研究在中国也取得了一定的进展。在现实经济中,究竟国债政策发生变化给中国经济带来多大的福利损失,还没有学者进行相应的讨论,大多数人仅局限于参照国外公债的一些指标讨论中国公债的合理性,而没有从数量上进行福利分析。本文在一个劳动力存在着冲击和消费者受到借贷限制的市场不完善的模型中,从中国的样本经济出发,考虑政府债务政策变化带来的福利损失。     

THE POVERTY REDUCTION SUCCESS OF PUBLIC TRANSFERS FOR WORKING AGE IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES IN THE UNITED STATES

Although there has been some research on the impacts of federal tax and transfer policies on poverty rates for immigrants, virtually no previous work investigates the most disadvantaged group of immigrants: refugees. We estimate probit models for three standard measures of poverty. We find that while immigrants and refugees in particular had much higher poverty rates in the early 1990s, the strong economic growth of the 1990s led to a convergence of those poverty rates by 2000. Our analysis demonstrates that the improvement was largely because of economic conditions and that welfare reform policies appear to have little differential impact on immigrants or refugees. We also find that refugees show a markedly greater response to local labor market conditions than other immigrants or native born. (JEL H3, I3, J1)     

Feminist Ecological Economics and Sustainability

Synopsis New developments in feminist ecological economics and ecofeminist economics are contributing to the search for theories and policy approaches to move economies toward sustainability. This paper summarizes work by ecofeminists and feminist ecological economists which is relevant to the sustainability challenge and its implications for the discipline of economics. Both democracy and lower material throughputs are generally seen as basic principles of economic sustainability. Feminist theorists and feminist ecological economists offer many important insights into the conundrum of how to make a democratic and equity-enhancing transition to an economy based on less material throughput. These flow from feminist research on unpaid work and caring labor, provisioning, development, valuation, social reproduction, non-monetized exchange relationships, local economies, redistribution, citizenship, equity-enhancing political institutions, and labor time, as well as creative modeling approaches and activism-based theorizing.      

The poverty experience of lone mothers and their children

Lone mothers, as sole caregivers and women, face unique challenges to guaranteeing the economic well-being of their children compared to lone fathers. While all lone parents face a trade-off in time spent earning wages and time spent caring for children, mothers are likely to earn wages lower than fathers, thus increasing their chances of falling into poverty. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013 Current Population Survey, we estimate the size of the gender poverty gap among lone-parent families. We apply the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to assess whether this gap can be solely attributed to parent and family demographics. Much of the poverty gap, however, is attributed to unobservables, suggesting the increased likelihood of being in poverty for lone-mothered families may be, in part, due to gender-based discrimination in labour markets.     

The Scope and Promising Future of Social Economics1

This essay explores the future potential for Social Economics. Since the beginning of modern economics, the mainstream has been steered by what might be called a material progress vision, whereby the generally unacknowledged pesumption is that economic growth will make the good life possible. Accordingly, such potential components of human welfare as more creative and fulfilling work, greater equality in the distribution of opportunity, wealth and income, and a greater degree of community can be more or less ignored for the present. Less guided by this vision, and unfettered by a pretense of value-neutrality, Social Economics does not view such components of welfare as subsidiary to economic growth. Instead, it is more focused upon the wholeness of social life, more concerned with the full requisites of the good and just society. By drawing upon recent work in psychology, sociology, and especially happiness research, Social Economics is found to offer a more promising orientation towards future economic concerns than does mainstream economics.     

Presidential Address: Welfare Economics Beyond Welfarist-Consequentialism

Capitalizing on the recent work in social choice theory, I re-examine the foundations of post-Pigovian welfare economics and social choice theory. The structure of the "old" and "new" welfare economics is critically scrutinized, and the culprits of the poverty of welfare economics as well as of Arrovian social choice theory are boiled down to their common informational basis, referred to as welfarist-consequentialism . Alternative avenues that may be taken in an attempt to escape from the poverty of normative economics are identified and examined. These are focused on interpersonal comparisons of welfare levels, opportunity preferences and the procedural fairness of social choice.
JEL Classification Numbers: B21, D63, D71.     

Welfare Analysis of Pension Reforms in an Ageing Japan

This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations to explore the effects of different public pension schemes on economic welfare, and intergenerational and intragenerational equity. Besides the benchmark case based on the 2004 public pension reform, the present paper considers two alternative reforms: financing the basic pension benefit through a consumption tax, and eliminating the earnings‐related pension benefit. The simulation results suggest that even the consumption‐tax financing of only the basic pension, namely, the combination of both reforms, might not improve overall economic welfare, although it increases economic output by inducing capital formation.     

Mundane heroines: Conflict,Ethnicity, Gender,and Female Headship in Eastern Sri Lanka

For the last twenty years, eastern Sri Lanka has witnessed a bitter and bloody civil conflict. This paper explores the experience of female-headed households in the region. Only partially the product of war, such households cannot be bundled together as a social problem with a single solution. Our study endorses the feminist suspicion of falsely homogenizing accounts of women's lives and suggests instead an alternative emphasis on the many ways in which gendered relations of dominance and subordination are maintained. With its co-existing Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhala groups, eastern Sri Lanka facilitates the exploration of ethnicity as a source of variation. The households included in this study share a common structure and face the same economic problems, yet ethnic differences divide them. The paper charts the problems, strategies, and partial triumphs of these lone mothers and proposes policies to help them in their mundane but heroic struggle.     

Making Welfare Work: The Politics of Reform

Welfare reform, if it is to be successful in the longer–term, needs to be based on a carefully thought out political strategy. The new political arithmetic, where the poor are an electoral minority, and many working class voters have rising aspirations, requires welfare reform to appeal to the interests of the majority. While welfare reform similarly must work with rather than against the grain of human nature, self–interest has to be harnessed in a way which builds an inclusive programme. The Government's drive towards ever greater means–tested provision looks good in year one. The penalties means–tests impose on working, saving and honesty become apparent only later with an ever–growing proportion of the population having to think about how best to work this system. Equally importantly, this drive to even greater means–tested dependency is set to blow apart some of the key characteristics which underpin a common citizenship.     

POVERTY DYNAMICS DURING TRADE REFORM: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL VIETNAM

This paper implements and adapts the conceptual framework developed by Winters (2002) that identifies the transmission mechanisms between trade policy reform and household welfare outcomes. We make use of household panel data from Vietnam collected in two years, 1992–93 and 1997–98 that span the very earliest years of the reform period and its immediate after effects. Poverty dynamics are modeled using changes in consumption expenditure and poverty transition models. The trade effect is captured by a set of variables that are most likely to have an impact on rural poverty, namely prices of staples and employment in the export sector. We show that trade liberalization has a material and positive effect on rural household welfare and this trade effect is largely transmitted to the poor through the labor market channel.     

Restricted and Unrestricted Dominance for Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty Orderings

This paper extends the previous literature on the ethical links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show inter alia, how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of social welfare, and a robust ranking of relative poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of inequality, and this, for any order of stochastic dominance.