To date, no published research has focused on women's homelessness within the comparative housing context. This thesis bridges that gap. In doing so, the thesis fuses the three theoretical frameworks of welfare theory, comparative analysis and feminism and social policy to reveal the similarities and differences between the "homelessness systems" of England, Ireland and France and how these systems respond to homeless women. The thesis demonstrates the value of using welfare typologies to ground comparative research but also shows how dominant welfare theory is inherently gender blind by its over reliance on the dichotomies of the state and the market. The thesis shows how welfare regime theory places an undue emphasis on paid employment to the detriment of women's unpaid labour as carers of children thereby reinforcing the gender stereotypes on which welfare typologies depend. By using Leeds, Cork and Lyon as instrumental case study cities, the thesis reviews the nature of each country's distinct welfare approach within a feminist review of welfare theory in England, Ireland and France. The institutional risk to homelessness for women in each case study country is assessed by focusing on four interrelated variables which have consistently been identified as causing and perpetuating homelessness amongst women. In assessing the institutional risk, reference is made to notions of modern risk society. The four variables selected for the analysis were: domestic violence; relationship breakdown; poverty and being a household type of a single parent family. Analysis of primary data from homelessness professionals in each case study city revealed that whilst being a single parent family was most frequently identified by respondents as a primary trigger to homelessness in women in the three case study cities, this institutional risk was substantially reduced in Lyon. The research has also shown significant variations between countries in respect of the relative risk posed by poverty, domestic violence and relationship breakdown and the thesis relates these differences to key debates surrounding welfare regime theory and feminism. The thesis highlights women's over reliance on state sponsored solutions to homelessness both at the point of housing crisis and in the longer term, despite the variation in homelessness systems, the nature and level of "social" housing stock and the relative ideological commitment towards homeownership in each country.

In dem Beitrag werden die sozialpolitischen Initiativen in der Regierungsperiode von Michelle Bachelet (2006-2011) in Chile und von Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) in Brasilien dargestellt. Beide sozialdemokratischen Regierungen markieren im jeweiligen nationalen Kontext einen Linksruck. Die Untersuchung geht der Frage nach, ob die Reformen eine gleichheitsfördernde Wirkung entfaltet haben und einen Bruch mit neoliberalen Paradigmen in der Sozialpolitik bedeuten. Um die aktuellen Veränderungen einschätzen zu können, werden diese in einen größeren historischen und politökonomischen Kontext eingebettet. Die Analyse der Wohlfahrtsregime der beiden Länder stützt sich auf den institutionalistischen Zugang von Esping-Andersen. Mit Bezug auf Kategorien wie Universalisierung, De-Kommodifizierung/Anti-Wert, De-Familialisierung und Informalität wagen die AutorInnen am Ende eine Einschätzung, inwiefern unter Lula und Bachelet sozialdemokratische Politik betrieben wurde.

The aim of the thesis is to analyze the transformation of the Turkish welfare regime in the framework of the social security reforms and the effect of the individual pension system on both this transformation and women&rsquo / s welfare considering the gender gap in retirement. While there is a growing literature on Turkey&rsquo / s social security reform, there are only few studies on the gender dimension of social security and the gender effects of the reform. This study aims to contribute to this literature by examining the gender gap in recently introduced individual pension system (2003) in Turkey from a sociological perspective. The literature review focuses mainly on Esping-Andersen&rsquo / s welfare regime typology and its critics to categorize the current welfare regime of Turkey. The Southern European welfare regimes are examined particularly to construct a theoretical framework for the Turkish welfare regime and its transformation. Furthermore, the literature on gender inequality and social security is examined to discuss the gender gap in private pension systems. This thesis based upon some statistical and actuarial analyses to explore the gender gap. By using &lsquo / actual data&rsquo / the effects of some sociodemographic and socio-economic factors on the participation and the contribution rate to the individual pension system are examined. Besides, gender gap in benefits that arise from the defined contribution schemes in a serious of projection using a stochastic actuarial model is analyzed. The study is supported by the interviews made with three experts and decision makers about these issues.

Rapid population aging driven by increasing life expectancy and falling birthrates has resulted in substantial increases in the old-age dependency ratio and decreases in the ratio of workers to retirees in all developed nations. In this context, some policymakers look to the support role of the family to moderate the effects of potentially shrinking public support. Yet, relatively little is known about the flow of transfers between family generations across the life cycle or the influence of public policy on the size and timing of those transfers. A core objective of this dissertation is to study the nature and net value of family transfers, defined in terms of the financial value of various types of transfers parents give to children (e.g., money, care and help, grandchild care, and co-residence) net of the value of the same types transfers they receive from children. Data for this study come primarily from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, and the sample includes 36,095 parent-child dyads from 11 European countries representing social democratic, conservative, and traditional welfare-state regimes. Time transfers are monetized using information on minimum and average hourly wages. The net value of intergenerational family transfers over the adult life cycle is estimated using piecewise linear spline regression. The findings reveal that intergenerational family transfers are nontrivial across mature European welfare states. Their net value follows a nonlinear pattern of positive transfers from parents to grown children until advanced old age when the net value declines sharply and ultimately becomes negative--the point at which the generational exchange starts mostly to benefit parents. The transition starts later and is less pronounced across more generous welfare states in Northern Europe, while the opposite is true of less generous welfare states in Southern Europe. Transfer behavior of parents and grown children across Europe is most consistent with the need for help and ability to give. The results demonstrate that assessments of the effects of public policies affecting intergenerational redistribution of resources would benefit from taking into account how family members of different generations redistribute resources due to changes in those policies. / text

The aim of this PhD thesis was to illustrate the modernisation of Swedish and British welfare policies during the time of the EU’s Lisbon Agenda which aimed at reconciling social protection with labour market integration. Specifically it should be illustrated if both countries managed to cope with the weaknesses and shortcomings that European policy recommendations identified in relation to unemployment benefits, social assistance schemes, parental leave systems and childcare subsidies. The attempt to grasp which role (European) ‘ideas’ were able to play in national welfare modernisation processes between 1998-2008 constituted a key consideration in this regard. By using a case-study design it is worked out that Sweden and Great Britain followed their European recommendations; not completely but significantly. Yet, causal connections can hardly be established and the overall development doesn’t constitute a ‘top-down’ implementation of EU recommendations. In both cases a discourse analysis reveals that the realization of European ideas rather depends on party-political preferences and the arrangement of national discourses. It is shown that ideas become powerful in puzzling situations when existing discourses are challenged and in line with the work of authors like Jørgen Goul Anderssen or Vivien A. Schmidt this thesis confirms the importance of an actor-centred perspective for explaining welfare policies. Considering Sweden as a socialdemocratic and Great Britain as a liberal welfare regime the PhD thesis aims as well at contributing to a better understanding of how policy reforms affected these two differing regime types. For the time during the Lisbon Agenda it holds that they moved ‘closer’ to each other and that welfare modernisation can be described as an exercise of making the social democratic welfare regime a better social democratic welfare regime and of making the liberal welfare regime a better liberal welfare regime. Yet, in 2008 the international financial crisis hit the EU and two years later the Lisbon Strategy was replaced by the EU 2020 Strategy. The PhD thesis takes these developments into account, illustrates the major changes in Swedish and British welfare policies and compares them to the research period. Rather untypical developments in Sweden lead to the conclusion that there might be a certain ‘carousel-effect’ which seems to kind of reallocate ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ between the different welfare regimes. For Great Britain the conclusion is drawn, that the conservative coalition government triggered a transformation process which wasn’t first and foremost caused by the international financial crisis but represented more of a political choice to make the liberal welfare regime more liberal.

Sweden and Hungary both applied for European Union membership in the beginning of the 1990s. The 1990s were also the years of economic deregulation inspired by an ideology: neoliberalism, which affected many policy fields. Since the early 1990s, both countries have transformed aspects of their welfare systems and carried out overarching pension reforms. This paper aims to study whether neoliberalism through the EU has affected the two countries welfare system. The effect of neoliberalism on the welfare system is examined by doing a comparative case study on Hungary’s and Sweden’s pension reforms from the 1990’s all the way to the 2020’s. The EU’s role in this process is presented through a policy analysis of EU directives aimed at regulating the operations of occupational pension providers.

This paper analyzes the effects of globalization on implicit tax rates (ITRs) on labour income, capital income, and consumption in the EU15 and Central and Eastern European New Member States (CEE NMS). We find a positive effect of globalization on the ITR on labour income in the EU15, but no effect on the ITR on capital income, and a negative effect on ITR on consumption. There is a significant negative effect on the ITR on capital income in the social-democratic and southern welfare regimes, a marginally significant negative effect in the liberal regime; a negative effect on the ITR on consumption in the social-democratic, conservative, and liberal regimes; and a positive effect on the ITR on labour income in all welfare regimes. In the CEE NMS there is no effect of globalization on any ITRs. (author's abstract) / Series: Discussion Papers SFB International Tax Coordination

Un consensus s’est formé autour de l’idée que la solidarité familiale ferait contrepoids à l’augmentation des inégalités et que le pays constituerait - à un âge donné - le principal facteur de différenciation dans sa mise en œuvre. Au contraire, les résultats exposés montrent comment l’intervention familiale contribue à stratifier, dans chaque contexte national, les conditions d’entrée dans la vie adulte. A l’aide de l’enquête SHARE (Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement), nous étudions le déploiement dans treize pays européens des trois principaux types de transfert intergénérationnel réalisés par les parents en direction de leurs descendants adultes : les dons d’argent, le maintien des jeunes au foyer parental, et les services rendus. Dans tous les pays, ces pratiques constituent des vecteurs de transmission des inégalités d’une génération à l’autre : les dons d’argent dépendent fortement des ressources des pourvoyeurs - en particulier de leur patrimoine -, la cohabitation aboutit à des inégalités significatives du point de vue des ressources perçues, et les services, quoiqu’apparemment guidés par les besoins des jeunes adultes, jouent un rôle significatif dans la reproduction de la division genrée du travail domestique. En définitive, cette thèse contribue à réorienter le regard sur les déterminants et les impacts sociaux de la solidarité familiale, ainsi que sur l’articulation en Europe entre les trois « piliers » du Welfare (public, marchand et familial). Elle incite à réviser la vision usuelle des conséquences en terme de stratification sociale de l’inégale intervention familiale dans les premières années de la vie adulte. / Family solidarity is usually regarded as a counterweight to the growth of inequalities, and - for a given age - the country is considered a major differentiation factor in its implementation process. On the contrary, our results show how family intervention stratifies, in each national context, the transition to adulthood and contributes to the transmission of social inequalities from one generation to another. Building on the SHARE survey project, we compare the development of the three main kinds of intergenerational transfers from parents to their offspring in thirteen European countries : monetary gifts, intergenerational coresidency and time transfers. In the whole set of countries, these practices are vectors of intergenerational transmission of inequalities : gifts are largely based upon parents’ resources - and, above all, their wealth -, coresidency brings out significant inequalities to its beneficiaries, and social support, even if apparently answering children’s needs, plays an essential role in the reproduction of the gendered division of domestic work. As a consequence, this work advocates for a new focus on determinants and social impacts of family solidarity, and sheds new light on the relation between the three “pillars” of the welfare regime (public sector, market, family). Last but not least, it leads to a renovation of the traditional understanding of consequences of the unequal family intervention during the first years of adulthood.

No description available.

La pauvreté monoparentale touche de nombreux pays développés au point que la monoparentalité est restée pendant longtemps associée à la pauvreté. Malgré les efforts de l’État-providence, les systèmes de protection sociale s’avèrent souvent inefficaces et inadaptés aux changements de la structure familiale et de la diversité des modes de résidence. Or, les situations des familles monoparentales ne sont pas semblables d’une société à une autre. Certaines sociétés adoptent des régimes providentiels qui offrent des conditions plutôt favorables aux familles quel que soit leur statut (monoparental ou biparental), tandis que d’autres se caractérisent par des systèmes moins égalitaires et moins favorables aux familles monoparentales. Notre thèse cherche à déconstruire le lien entre la pauvreté et la monoparentalité en poussant plus loin la réflexion sur les régimes providentiels. Le bien-être des familles monoparentales dépend des arrangements institutionnels des régimes qui assurent des ressources à travers les trois piliers que sont l’État, le marché et la famille. Certaines sociétés favorisent le pilier de l’État comme principal pourvoyeur de ressources alors que d’autres mettent l’accent sur le marché. Dans d’autres cas, la solidarité familiale est considérée comme étant fondamentale dans le bien-être des individus. Parmi ces trois piliers, il est souvent difficile de trouver la combinaison la plus appropriée pour protéger les familles monoparentales et leur assurer une certaine sécurité et une autonomie économique. Lorsque les gouvernements adoptent la politique de prise en charge des familles monoparentales, ces dernières deviennent très dépendantes de l’assistance sociale et des programmes d’aide publique. Dans un contexte libéral, les mesures d’incitation au travail qui visent les chefs de famille monoparentale ont plutôt tendance à réduire cette dépendance. Mais dans bien des cas, les familles monoparentales sont amenées à dépendre d’un revenu du marché qui ne les aide pas toujours à sortir de la pauvreté. Lorsque nous regardons le troisième pilier, celui de la famille, il s’avère souvent que les solidarités qui proviennent de cette source sont limitées et occasionnelles et nécessitent parfois une réglementation spéciale pour les dynamiser (comme c’est le cas des pensions alimentaires). L’articulation de ces piliers et leur apport au bien-être des familles monoparentales soulève une question fondamentale : Quelles sont les possibilités pour les chefs de famille monoparentale de fonder et maintenir un ménage autonome qui ne soit ni pauvre ni dans la dépendance par rapport à une seule source de revenu qui peut provenir de l’État, du marché ou de la famille ? Pour examiner cette question, nous avons procédé à des comparaisons internationales et interprovinciales à partir des données du Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Le choix des comparaisons internationales est très utile pour situer le Québec dans un environnement de régimes providentiels avec un cadre théoriquement et conceptuellement structuré pour comprendre les politiques de lutte contre la pauvreté monoparentale. Cette recherche montre principalement que la pauvreté monoparentale est très problématique dans les régimes qui privilégient le marché comme principal pilier de bien-être. Elle l’est aussi dans certains pays qui privilégient les transferts et adoptent des politiques de prise en charge envers les familles monoparentales qui restent largement désavantagées par rapport aux familles biparentales. Par contre, certains régimes favorisent une complémentarité entre ce que peuvent tirer les familles du marché du travail et ce qu’elles peuvent tirer des ressources de l’État. Généralement, ce genre d’approche mène vers des taux de pauvreté plus faibles chez les familles monoparentales. Le Québec fait partie des sociétés où le marché représente une source fondamentale de bien-être. Toutefois, la pauvreté monoparentale est moins problématique que chez ses voisins d’Amérique du Nord. De nombreux chefs de famille monoparentale dans la province occupent des emplois à temps plein sans être désavantagés. Cependant, les chefs de famille monoparentale qui occupent des emplois à temps partiel sont largement plus exposés à la pauvreté. Pourtant, dans certaines sociétés, particulièrement aux Pays-Bas, ce statut d’emploi offre des conditions meilleures pour la conciliation travail-famille. / Single parent poverty has long been a significant challenge for policy makers in developed countries. Some societies have been more effective than others at developing policy regimes that provide conditions more favourable to families regardless of their status (single parent or two-parent families). As a result, the circumstances and experiences of single parent families tend to vary considerably from state to state. This thesis seeks to better understand the role of welfare state in mediating the relationship between poverty and single parenthood. The circumstances of single parenthood depend on three welfare pillars: the state, the market and the family. Some societies place emphasis on the role of the state, while others favour the market. In other cases, the family is considered to be primarily responsible for individual well being. The combination that best protects single parent families is not always clear. If governments are too generous, families may become dependent on welfare and public assistance programs. In a liberal context, incentives to work that target single parents tend to reduce this dependence, but simply finding a job doesn’t always provide a route out of poverty and financial vulnerability. At the same time, family supports often turn out to be more limited and transitory than most families need. What, then, is the best combination that permits single parents to maintain an autonomous household that is neither poor nor overly dependent on one welfare pillar? In order to examine this question, we present a series of international and interprovincial comparisons using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). We explore differences in single and dual-parent family poverty outcomes among several high income nations. We place particular emphasis on how the welfare policies of Quebec compare to other members of the World of Welfare Regimes. Our results show that single parent poverty is greatest in societies that allow well-being to depend most heavily on the market. It is greatest also in societies that offer state provisions that consist of mainly allowances and that neglect other sources of well-being. We find that certain regimes provide a good combination of welfare pillars that support families, which in turn result in lower poverty levels among single-parent families. While Quebec, like the rest of Canada place more emphasis on market than state pillar, it structures its state supports in such a way that it actually encourages greater labour market participation and amplifies the benefits of market resources for single parents. But in the same time, Quebec reports some of the lowest single parent poverty rates in the nation. In contrast, a high proportion of working single parent families in some other countries and the rest of Canada confront a high risk of poverty. When we consider part-time work, we find that single parents in Quebec are poorly protected and are at a higher risk of poverty. Yet some societies, particularly the Netherlands, have managed to use part-time work as a strategic tool to find a balance between work and family activities, where a very high proportion of single parents are working part-time jobs with low risk of poverty.