Private transfers and emerging welfare states in East Asia: Comparative perspectives

Empirical studies on income distribution and poverty have indicated that the public transfer system has been successful in terms of poverty and inequality reduction in welfare states. However, very little attention has been paid to private transfers in this analysis. Recently, while there has been an increasing interest in the unique features of East Asian welfare states/regimes, many scholars have begun to have an interest in the role of the family in their welfare mix. This article aims to widen the scope of comparative income studies, firstly by analyzing 12 Western welfare states and two newly emerging East Asian welfare states, i.e. South Korea and Taiwan, and secondly, by comparing the poverty and inequality reduction effects of private transfers with those of public transfers. The Luxemburg Income Study dataset is used for the analysis. The empirical results indicate that private transfers are much more effective than public transfers in terms of income inequality and poverty reduction effects in both South Korea and Taiwan, in contrast to western counterparts including three Southern European countries. Finally, based on the results, we propose further research questions

Feminisation of poverty in 12 welfare states: Strengthening cross-regime variations?

The feminisation of poverty is said to have become a common feature in the majority of advanced welfare states, but it is equally true that there has been significant variation in the feminisation of poverty from one country to another. While the concept of the feminisation of poverty remains controversial, there have been very few attempts to reveal a detailed picture from a comparative perspective. Considering this background, this study aims to illustrate the feminisation of poverty in 12 welfare states (Liberal - Australia, Canada, UK, US; Conservative - Austria, France, Germany, Italy; Nordic - Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden) between the 1980s and the 2000s and to analyse whether or not there has been any convergence or divergence between these welfare states. This study will evaluate the scope and depth of the feminisation of poverty by conducting analyses not only in terms of different sex, but in terms of different population groups. Further, the changing role of welfare states will be assessed via an analysis of the antipoverty role of public transfers in each country. The Luxemburg Income Study dataset will be used for empirical analysis. This paper will argue that while the feminisation of poverty has been slowed down and even reversed in certain cases, cross-national differences have been increasingly visible. The results of this study also show that the welfare regime framework can prove to be a useful tool for understanding the similarities and the differences in the feminisation of poverty across different Western welfare state regimes

Single-Copy Certification of Two-Qubit Gates without Entanglement

A quantum state transformation can be generally approximated by single- and two-qubit gates. This, however, does not hold with noisy intermediate-scale quantum technologies due to the errors appearing in the gate operations, where errors of two-qubit gates such as controlled-NOT and SWAP operations are dominated. In this work, we present a cost efficient single-copy certification for a realization of a two-qubit gate in the presence of depolarization noise, where it is aimed to identify if the realization is noise-free, or not. It is shown that entangled resources such as entangled states and a joint measurement are not necessary for the purpose, i.e., a noise-free two-qubit gate is not needed to certify an implementation of a two-qubit gate. A proof-of-principle demonstration is presented with photonic qubits.Comment: 8 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1812.0208