Public health care systems in countries all over the world are confronted with increasing difficulties. The problems are mainly economic, but they also reflect difficulties of adaptation to changes both in society as a whole and within the health care services. The atmosphere of a crisis results from internal struggles within the health care system and with other welfare and social services tha...

Introduction: SINTEF Health Services Research is part of the SINTEF Foundation. Research areas are evaluation of health and welfare services. The health and welfare authorities are the main commissioners of our research. Policy practice: SINTEF is the main supplier of research on health and social service reports to the authorities. The institute has competence on hospital and outpatient servic...

This article demonstrates the potential of the disaggregated expenditure approach in comparative welfare state analysis by applying it for comparing patterns of welfare spending across 28 European countries. An initial factor analysis shows that welfare states differ primarily along their emphasis either on cash transfers for the elderly or on social services and cash transfers for the working-...

The purpose of this article is to show that, contrary to neoliberal belief, social welfare services and spending cannot be regarded as a cost whose funding should depend on wealth created by the private sector. Social welfare services and spending should be instead recognised as the driving force behind a development dynamics based on knowledge-intensive production and behind an economy whose m...

OBJECTIVES We explored changing relations between substance use, welfare receipt, and substance-abuse treatment among low-income mothers before and after welfare reform. METHODS We examined annual data from mothers aged 18 to 49 years in the 1990-2001 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse and the 2002 National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Logistic regression was used to examine determinan...

The first of relevance to this discussion is that the welfare policies instituted over the past three decades have produced what Pearson calls a ‘gammon’ (or artificial) welfare economy within Aboriginal societies which contrasts with the ‘real’ economies of both traditional Aboriginal subsistence and the market economy. It is the absence of meaningful reciprocity between recipients of services...