International Journal of Social Welfare: Social Policy and Poverty, Volume 20, Number 3, April 2011

This special issue of the International Journal of Social Welfare on Social Policy and Poverty contains a guest editorial and five articles based on research carried out by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) for its flagship report, Combating Poverty and Inequality.

Against the backdrop of calls for accelerated progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals in a context of multiple crises, the contributions from UNRISD in this special issue highlight the role of social policy for social development and poverty reduction. They address three key themes: (i) the role of social protection, in particular cash transfers, in poverty reduction; (ii) the importance of labour markets and labour market policies for poverty reduction; and (iii) the financing of welfare policies. The authors say that social protection policies should be grounded in values of social justice and human rights, which call for strong state commitment for universal programmes. Long-term social policies that benefit from broad-based political support and are grounded in sustainable financing mechanisms should be institutionalized.

Table of Contents

Editorial
Sven Hessle

Guest Editorial: Social policy and poverty: An introduction
Katja Hujo and Elena Gaia

Social protection and poverty
Armando Barrientos

Cash transfers, social protection and poverty reduction
Rachel Slater

Labour market policies, poverty and insecurity
Guy Standing

Taxation, developmental state capacity and poverty reduction
Jonathan Di John

Financing welfare regimes: mapping heterogeneous revenue structures
Ian Gough and Miriam Abu Sharkh



Employment integration after therapeutic community treatment: A case study from Spain
José Javier López-Goni, Javier Fernández-Montalvo, Juan Carlos Menéndez, Fausto Yudego, Angel Rico García and Sonia Esarte

Discrimination against children with disability in China
Xiaoyuan Shang, Karen R. Fisher and Jiawen Xie

Negative encounters with social insurance officers: Experiences of women and men on long-term sick leave
Marianne Upmark, Jan Hagberg and Kristina Alexanderson

Migrants' social protection as a transnational process: Public policies and emigrant initiative in the case of Ecuador
Paolo Boccagni