Introducing SaMip: The Social Assistance and Minimum Income Protection Interim Dataset

--

Minimum Income Protection and Low-Income Standards: Is Social Assistance Enough for Poverty Alleviation?

Minimum income protection and social assistance is the last-resort safety net of the welfare state, targeted to the most vulnerable groups in society. Poverty alleviation is thus one chief objective of such benefits. Whether this objective is fulfilled is continuously discussed and debated. This paper provide new evidence on this issue and offers an analysis of social assistance benefit levels in 16 industrialized welfare democracies over the period 1990-2000. It is shown that the period 1990-1995 was characterized primarily by stagnated benefit levels, while in the latter half of the 1990s benefits declined. In most countries, social assistance fails to provide income above the poverty threshold, something that makes it difficult to view these benefits as effective redistributive instruments.-

Health Care Developments in EU Member States: Regressing Trensds and Institutional Similarity?

Due to various structural pressures predictions of retrenchment and conformity of social policies have been legion, both in terms of expenditure and institutional set-up. Recent research has focused on changes in cash benefits. Comparative analyses of changes in services, the other pillar of social policy, have however so far been limited to a few countries. The purpose of this paper is to perform a diachronical cross-national analysis of health care services. We thus raise questions of decline and convergence of European health care systems. Contrary to previous claims we find that European health care systems are not particularly hit by retrenchment and convergence is absent in key health care dimensions, namely coverage, financing and provision. The empirical analysis is based on institutional indicators rather than expenditure levels. We utilize OECD Health Data and provide both a descriptive analysis and multi-level regressions.Health care; Citizenship rights; EU; welfare

The Nordic welfare model in a European Perspective

Social assistance and minimum income benefits are important indicators for assessing the very basic objective of social policy, namely to mitigate financial hardship and alleviate poverty. The Nordic countries have succeeded well from a comparative point of view in terms of poverty alleviation. However, last-resort safety-nets are changing. Scattered evidence indicate that Nordic social assistance have become less generous. Perhaps are the Nordic countries becoming more similar to the welfare models of Continental Europe or the United Kingdom? This study analyses central dimensions of Nordic social assistance, such as the generosity, scope and effectiveness of benefits. Data for the empirical analyses are from SaMip and LIS. We show that Finland and Sweden, particularly, have suffered from welfare decline, including less generous and effective benefits.Nordic welfare; Europe; Social policy; Poverty alleviation; welfare decline; Sweden; Finland

The forest-hydrology-poverty nexus in Central America : An heuristic analysis

A"forest-hydrology-poverty nexus"hypothesis asserts that deforestation in poor upland areas simultaneously threatens biodiversity and increases the incidence of flooding, sedimentation, and other damaging hydrological processes. The authors use rough heuristics to assess the applicability of this hypothesis to Central America. They do so by using a simple rule of thumb to identify watersheds at greater risk of hydrologically significant land use change: these are watersheds where there is a relatively large interface between agriculture and forest, and where this interface is on a steep slope. The authors compare the location of these watersheds with spatial maps of poverty and forests (for Guatemala and Honduras) and with maps of population and forests (for Central America at large). The analysis is performed for watersheds defined at different scales. The authors find plausible evidence for a forest-biodiversity-poverty connection in Guatemala, and to a lesser extent in Honduras. In the rest of Central America, there are relatively few areas where forest meets agriculture on steep slopes-either the forest or the slopes are lacking. And the ratio of these forest/agriculture/hillside interfaces to watershed area declines markedly as larger-scale watersheds are considered. This directs attention to relatively small watersheds for further investigation of the"nexus."Hydrology,Water Conservation,Agricultural Research,Wetlands,Environmental Economics&Policies,Wetlands,Forestry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Hydrology,Agricultural Research

A COMPARISON OF LIVEWEIGHT, CARCASS AND LEAN MEAT CRITERIA FOR THE FEEDLOT REPLACEMENT DECISION

Livestock Production/Industries,

A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO THE FEEDLOT REPLACEMENT DECISION

Livestock Production/Industries,

AN EXAMINATION OF THE STABILITY OF COOPERATION IN A VOLUNTARY COLLECTIVE ACTION: THE CASE OF NONPOINT-SOURCE POLLUTION IN AN AGRICULTURAL WATERSHED

This paper addresses the collective action problem of nonpoint-source pollution control in a small agricultural watershed. At issue is the stability of cooperative behavior among a group of farmers, who have voluntarily agreed to discontinue their use of the herbicide atrazine due to high concentrations of the herbicide in a local water supply. Continued cooperation among the group is threatened by the unexpected cancellation of cyanazine, an inexpensive and widely used alternative to atrazine. With cyanazine no longer available, the farmers will face a significant increase in weed control costs if they continue to use products that do not contain atrazine. Is cooperation among the farmers still possible despite the increased cost of cooperating? This research explores the economic and behavioral factors that influence the collective outcome of this social dilemma. The collective action is modeled as a recurrent coordination problem. The producers (farmers) are engaged in a repeated assurance game with imperfect public information, where producers' choices are driven by the desire to coordinate their actions with the others in the group. A producer's decision to cooperate or defect is based on a threshold approach; if the number of others believed to be cooperating exceeds the level of cooperation required to make cooperation beneficial, then the producer will choose to cooperate. Otherwise, the producer will defect. Since producers are unable to directly observe the choices of the others in the group, each producer must rely on a subjective assessment of the group's behavior based on the realization of the public outcome, the concentration of atrazine in the lake. Producers use a naive Bayesian learning process to update their beliefs about the joint actions of the group. The formal learning process is modeled using a sequential quasi-Bayesian procedure that is consistent with the fictitious play model of learning. The interaction between the producers and the impact of their collective behavior on the levels of atrazine in the lake is formulated as a computational multi-agent system (MAS). The MAS is an artificial representation of the collective action problem that integrates the economic, behavioral and environmental factors that influence the decision-making process of producers. The MAS is used to simulate the evolution of collective behavior among the group and to evaluate the effectiveness of selected incentive mechanisms in preventing the collapse of joint cooperation. The results suggest that without additional incentives, farmers are likely to abandon their voluntary agreement and resume their use of atrazine within the watershed. It is then demonstrated how a combination of policy instruments can be used to alter the underlying game configuration of the collective action problem, resulting in cooperative outcomes. An ambient-based penalty, when used in conjunction with a subsidy payment, is shown to produce divergent incentive structures that shift the classification of the collective action away from a coordination problem with two equilibria to a mixed configuration containing several different game structures and many possible equilibria. This result has important consequences in terms of the evolution of producer behavior and the set of possible collective outcomes. The analysis concludes with an example, which demonstrates that when a mixture of game structures characterizes the collective action, joint cooperation is not a prerequisite to the realization of socially desirable outcomes. By carefully selecting the combination of subsidy payment and ambient penalty, a policy maker can manipulate the underlying structure of the collective action, whereby producers with the smallest impact on water quality choose to defect while all others cooperate.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Status Buying Responses in a Survey of Students and Variations in Informational Levels.

This article reports on a survey of a large number of undergraduate students in the U.S. They were queried about whether they preferred living in a society where they had high relative income (status) but low purchasing power or a society where they have low status, but high purchasing power.While the overwhelming majority indicate a desire to buy status, the information given about intergenerational mobilty and amenities like health available in the different socities makes a big difference in the responses. The data indicate that that the majority desiring to buy status disappears with better information.

Breaking down the delta wing vortex: The role of vorticity in the breakdown process

Experimental x-wire measurements of the flowfield above a 70 and 75 deg flat plate delta wing were performed at a Reynolds number of 250,000. Grids were taken normal to the wing at various chordwise locations for angles of attack of 20 and 30 deg. Axial and azimuthal vorticity distributions were derived from the velocity fields. The dependence of circulation on distance from the vortex core and on chordwise location was also examined. The effects of nondimensionalization in comparison with other experimental data is made. The results indicate that the circulation distribution scales with the local semispan and grows in a nearly linear fashion in the chordwise direction. The spanwise distribution of axial vorticity is severely altered through the breakdown. The axial vorticity components with a negative sense, such as that found in the secondary vortex, seem to remain unaffected by changes in wind sweep or angle of attack, in direct contrast to the positive components. In addition, the inclusion of the local wing geometry into a previously derived correlation parameter allows the circulation of growing leading edge vortex flows to be reduced into a single curve