The new "Children's and Family Services Reviews" (CFSR) process focuses on the effectiveness of services to children and families by measuring client outcomes. This article reviews the research literature related to child welfare outcomes in order to provide a context for federal accountability efforts. It also summarizes the 2001 federal mandate to hold states accountable for child welfare out...

* Director, Division of Program Research, Office of the Commissioner. This review and analysis of social welfare expenditures in the United States continues the annual series presented by the Bulletin. Certain changes in the items included and in the grouping of individual items have been made in this year's article, based in part on the advice of a small group of consultants who reviewed the c...

We propose a decomposition of social welfare when consumers have quasi-linear utility functions under certain conditions satisfied in many models of imperfect competition. In our decomposition, social welfare is expressed as the sum of consumers’ gross utilities and trade surplus of non-numeraire commodities, which contribute to consumers’ utilities non-linearly. This decomposition is useful es...

Some commentators believe that slotting allowances enhance social welfare by providing retailers with an efficient way to allocate scarce retail shelf space. The claim is that, by offering their shelf space to the highest bidders, retailers act as agents for consumers and ensure that only the most socially desirable products obtain distribution. I show that this claim does not hold in a model i...

In Australian welfare reform debate, a range of approaches and policies have been advocated. Regardless of their diversity, I argue that the debate has an unnecessarily narrow framework resulting from the widespread acceptance of at least three welfare reform myths. First, is the idea that the current system is anachronistic and in disrepair. Instead of this narrow focus on welfare policy, I ar...

public participation in urban decision-making process is one of the main elements of a democratic system, which can help establish balance and harmony between different sections of the society. this paper mainly aims to study the effect of economic and social welfare on the degree of citizen participation in urban affairs. our main hypothesis emphasizes that there is a strong positive correlati...

This study builds on previous work by Giannakas and Fulton (2003, 2000) on the economics of output quotas in the presence of cheating by examining the efficiency of the policy in transferring income to producers as well as the optimal regulatory response to enforcement costs and farmer noncompliant behavior in a decentralized policy making environment. Analytical results show that enforcement c...