Social indicators and the study of inequality

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 5, "Social indicators in New York City." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors address some of the challenges faced by economists and others who undertake to measure well-being and inequality and to identify inequality's causes and effects. Their project - the New York City Social Indicators Survey (SIS) - uses social indicators to track economic well-being and inequality. By pushing beyond the limitations of current data sources, SIS will enable the authors to collect the data necessary to define inequality in concrete terms and evaluate whether New York City is becoming more or less unequal. Significantly, it will also shed light on what effect government policies have on inequality's magnitude and consequences.Economic indicators ; Public policy ; Income distribution ; New York (N.Y.)

Supports for Working Families: Work and Care Policies across Welfare States

Familienpolitik, Sozialpolitik, Sozialstaat, Eltern, Erwerbstätigkeit, Familie, Kinderbetreuung, Vereinigte Staaten, Westeuropa, Family policy, Social policy, Welfare state, Parents, Labour force participation, Family, Child care, United states, Western

Presentation: Gornick & Meyers

Presentation by Janet C. Gornick, City University of New York and Marcia K. Meyers, University of Washington on Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment, for the event: The Great American Time Squeeze: The Politics of Work and Family in a 24/7 World on March 3, 2005

Supporting the Employment of Mothers: Policy Variation Across Fourteen Welfare States

Despite their broadly similar political and economic systems, the rates and patterns of mothers\u27 employment vary considerably across industrialized countries. This variation raises questions about the role played by government policies in enabling mothers to choose employment and, in turn, in shaping both gender equality and family economic well-being. This paper compares fourteen OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support mothers\u27 employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on eighteen policy indicators are presented; these indicators were chosen to capture support for maternal employment, regardless of national intent. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differentiating policies that affect maternal employment from family policies more generally, while simultaneously aggregating individual policies and policy features into policy packages , these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions. The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the fourteen countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that supported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. In the remaining countries, government provisions were much more limited or discontinuous. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed notably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined. The links between these findings and three sets of outcomes are considered. The indices provide an improved measure of public support for maternal employment and are expected to help explain cross-national differences in the level and continuity of women\u27s labor market attachment. Prior findings on women\u27s labor supply provide initial support for this conclusion. These indices are also useful for contrasting family benefits that are provided through direct cash transfers with those that take the form of support for mothers\u27 employment. Cross-national variation in combinations of transfers with employment supports is found to correspond to differences in child poverty rates. Finally, these policy findings contribute to the body of scholarship that seeks to integrate gender issues more explicitly into research on welfare state regimes. This study suggests that the country clusters identified in the dominant regime model fail to cohere with respect to the subset of family policies that specifically help women to combine paid work with parenting

The Cost of Caring: Childhood Disability and Poor Families

Children in poor families are at heightened risk for disabilities and chronic health problems, and care for these children can impose substantial costs on families and public programs. Although the prevalence and costs of disabilities among poor children have important policy implications, they have been largely overlooked in research on poverty and welfare and on the costs of childhood disabilities. This paper analyzes the prevalence of childhood disabilities and chronic illness among welfare recipient families in California and the probability families caring for these children experience higher out-of-pocket costs and material hardship then do other similar families

Expensive Children in Poor Families: Out-of-Pocket Expenditures for the Care of Disabled and Chronically Ill Children and Welfare Reform

This study explores one aspect of the costs experienced by low-income families with one or more special needs children: direct, out-of-pocket expenses for items related to the child’s disability, such as special foods, transportation to medical clinics, or medical costs not covered by insurance. We find that almost half (46 percent) of a sample of California AFDC families with special needs children experienced some special expenses in the preceding month. About 20 percent of these low-income families experienced total costs exceeding $100. Families with severely disabled children were more likely to experience costs and tended to experience higher costs. While no more likely to experience special expenses, families of children with mental impairments tended to have higher costs than those with physical impairments. The primary impact of special expenses was to increase the percentage of families in deep poverty: those at or below 75 percent of poverty-level income. Taken as a group, however, families with special needs children appeared no more poor than other families. Much of this parity may be due to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Among families with severely disabled children, only 32 percent of those receiving SSI lived at or below poverty, while three quarters of those without SSI lived at or below poverty. Our findings suggest that out-of-pocket expenses are a substantial burden for some low-income families with special needs children and that the Supplemental Security Income program does a good job of alleviating these extraordinary outlays

Work, Welfare, and the Burden of Disability: Caring for Special Needs of Children in Poor Families

This paper addresses issues which arise at the juncture of welfare and disability policies. Using preliminary data from a recent survey of current and recent AFDC recipients in California, we find that disabilities and chronic health problems affect the mothers or children in 43 percent of all households in the AFDC system. The presence of one or more children with disabilities or chronic illnesses is found to have an impact on the economic well-being of families, with increased levels of direct hardship reported by families caring for one or more severely impaired children. Potential causes of higher levels of hardship are examined by considering the impact of direct expenses associated with the care of the child(ren) and reductions in the mother’s probability of paid employment. SSI receipt is found to have a modest antipoverty effect for families with special needs children, reducing the prevalence of poverty and extreme poverty for families even after the additional direct costs of caring for these children are considered

Building the Dual Earner/Dual Career Society: Policy Developments in Europe, CES Working Paper, no. 82, 2002

A new model of work and family life is emerging out of contemporary debates on social citizenship and the characteristics of the“woman-friendly” welfare state. The dual-earner/dual-carer model refers to a social and economic arrangement in which men and women engage symmetrically in both paid work in the labor market and in unpaid work in the home. Parents’ ability to balance family and market responsibilities, and to allocate employment and childcare-giving equally between mothers and fathers, could be facilitated by a package of state policies. Three areas of supportive policy – all invarious states of development across Europe – include: (1) family leave schemes that provide job protections and wage replacement for parents of young children; (2) affordable, high quality early childhood education and care, to a limited extent for very young children and to a much larger extent for children aged three to school-age; and (3) labor market regulations aimed at shortening the standard work week and strengthening remuneration for reduced-hour employment. In this paper, we review European policy provisions, and then turn our attention to the United States case. We suggest that embracing the vision of the dual-earner/dual-carer society may help to draw diverse but unified support for family policy development in the United States