The benefits system recognises that both disabled adults and children incur extra costs because of their disability. Yet little is known about the nature and extent of these costs, particularly for children. This thesis discusses the financial, social and emotional costs to parents of bringing up a child with a severe disability. A total of thirty-six focus group discussions were held with approximately 300 parents of severely disabled children. During these group discussions parents negotiated and agreed the minimum essential costs of bringing up a child with a severe disability. These data were used to construct budget standards, which were used to compare parents actual spending on disabled children and to investigate whether parents were able to afford to meet the budget standard. All the figures in this report have been up-rated by the Retail Price Index to year 2000 figures.

My thesis question whether access to and quality of medical care for the elderly deteriorated over the nineteenth century and thereby contributed negatively to welfare inequality. This hypothesis is based on a reading of the historiography of old age, in which historians and gerontologists develop a picture of declining socio-economic status of the elderly, an erosion of cultural meanings of ageing, and a scientific emphasis on the pathology and negative physiology of old age. It is also based on the assumption that Victorian providers were willing and able to allocate resources according to patient characteristics other than medical need. Informed by current health policies in the British National Health Service, I develop a rationing approach to examine the strategies employed to control supply and demand for scarce resources by the Bristol Royal Infirmary and Shoreditch Workhouse and Infirmary in London. Case study evidence on care inputs, admissions length of stay and treatment outcomes from both infirmaries is analysed for the period 1820-90. The data are correlated with trends in local demographic profiles and my own estimate of age-based medical need. I show that neither the Bristol Royal nor Shoreditch Infirmary allocated resources according to the relative medical need of their local population age groups. Instead, the young and middle-aged were prioritised at the expense of children and the elderly, most notably at the voluntary hospital. Access for the elderly did, however, improve at both institutions over time. As regards the quality of medical care, various outcome measures suggest that any differences n treatment content did not translate into worse survival chances for poor law patients. I conclude that, unlike societal status, medical care provision for the elderly did not deteriorate during my period, and that further research is needed to explain why they were underrepresented in the public as well as the private sector.

This thesis investigates the nature and evolution of the Brazilian income distribution during the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. The thesis presents a profile of the Brazilian income distribution, of the level and structure of poverty and inequality, and analyses how these have changed over time, making wider comparisons of social welfare. The empirical results are derived through application of best practice techniques of distributional analysis to micro-data from a large, annual and nationally representative household survey that permits estimation of comparable measures of poverty and inequality over time. Chapter 1 provides the background to the debate on poverty and inequality in Brazil, reviewing recent macroeconomic policy and performance and key empirical studies from the 1960s onwards. Chapter 2 presents and discusses the household data set, methodological issues in measuring incomes, poverty and inequality and presents the main tools of analysis that are applied in subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 analyses levels and changes in incomes, poverty and inequality, and tests the statistical significance of changes over time and robustness of results to assumptions about the degree of household economies of scale and to variations in the poverty line. Chapter 4 examines the structure of inequality focussing on a number of characteristics of the household and household head, including location and family type of the households, and age, gender, race and education of the household head. Changes in the structure of inequality are also analysed. Chapter 5 investigates the structure of poverty, examining the role of key characteristics of the population and how these have changed between 1981 and 1995. Chapter 6 concludes, discussing the policy implications of the results and possible avenues of further research.

This dissertation is concerned with the question of what role informal support networks play in the welfare mix of contemporary welfare states. Informal support is provided by family and friends on the one hand, and by voluntary organisations on the other. Using data from 116 semi-structured interviews with lone mothers, in the United Kingdom and Germany, the question of whether different welfare systems influence individual support mobilisation strategies is investigated. Lone mothers were selected because of their limited earning capacities which often result in a life in poverty and social exclusion - for them and for their children. It was shown in this research that informal and formal support alleviates these effects and the research project is guided by four main objectives: (1) to map ways in which lone mothers mobilise support from different sources; (2) to investigate whether lone mothers develop support mobilisation strategies in turning to formal and/or informal support sources; (3) to analyse whether differences in welfare state systems result in variances in informal support mobilisation behaviour; and finally, (4) to evaluate the role and importance of voluntary organisations as support providers for lone mothers. Empirical evidence is provided to demonstrate that informal support networks influence the utilisation of formal support. In contrast, variations in welfare state provision do not appear to have a significant impact on support mobilisation behaviour. Indeed, formal support mobilisation is a function of demographic characteristics, influenced by receipts from means-tested benefits and the extent of informal support. The utilisation of informal support was dependent on network structural and demographic variables, as well as reciprocity norms. The main finding of this research is that individual support mobilisation of lone mothers is determined by their specific circumstances, and not by their residence in different welfare states.

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