Disability, Work and Cash Benefits

This book examines the economic consequences of work disabilities, and public and private interventions that might enable disabled individuals to enter the work force for the first time, remain at work, or return to work. Three groups of papers are presented. The first group examines ways that labor market changes, policy interventions and individual choices shape the work force. The next analyzes both public and private return to work policies for the work disabled and for those with a severely disabling condition. The final group focuses on the specific needs of the disabled that affect their work force participation, including access to health care, personal assistance and assistive technologies.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1195/thumbnail.jp

Pro-Work Policy Proposals for Older Americans in the 21st Century

Reports that the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted sometime in the early part of the next century reinforce the need to make retirement policy in the United States more accommodating for those who want to work. While there is general agreement that disincentives to work at older ages in both Social Security and employer pension plans played an important role in the dramatic drop in retirement age from 1945 through 1985, skepticism exists over the ability of policy changes to both stop this trend and increase work at older ages. In this policy brief we summarize how government policy has influenced retirement since the end of World War II, show that reductions in some of the anti-work aspects of our retirement system in the 1980s appear to have ended the trend toward earlier and earlier retirement, and offer five pro-work policies which would increase work for twenty-first century older Americans

Marketing as a means to transformative social conflict resolution: lessons from transitioning war economies and the Colombian coffee marketing system

Social conflicts are ubiquitous to the human condition and occur throughout markets, marketing processes, and marketing systems.When unchecked or unmitigated, social conflict can have devastating consequences for consumers, marketers, and societies, especially when conflict escalates to war. In this article, the authors offer a systemic analysis of the Colombian war economy, with its conflicted shadow and coping markets, to show how a growing network of fair-trade coffee actors has played a key role in transitioning the country’s war economy into a peace economy. They particularly draw attention to the sources of conflict in this market and highlight four transition mechanisms — i.e., empowerment, communication, community building and regulation — through which marketers can contribute to peacemaking and thus produce mutually beneficial outcomes for consumers and society. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for marketing theory, practice, and public policy