n the September-October 2010 issue of Health Progress, my colleague Ron Hamel, who alternates writing this column with me, discussed the unfinished business of health care reform.1 Among the items he mentioned was that a concern for the common good has been lacking in the debate. He ended his essay by suggesting that Catholic social teaching can be a resource for resolving the unfinished busine...

Among the noncommunicable diseases, mental ill-health represents the major threat to social and economic progress because it impacts so powerfully on the most critical decades of life. Consequently, mental health reform is increasingly recognized as an urgent priority worldwide. This brings into sharp focus the role of evidence, and more specifically the Cochrane paradigm, in influencing decisi...

This paper describes how the social capital of rice farmers of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, as manifested in the tradition of collective farming practice, has changed. Collective rice farming persisted for decades, irrespective of critical events that challenged its continuation, due to two key factors: the high need for collective farming to ensure subsistence, and the availability of a closel...

This paper analyses social policy reform in the past 30 years in Spain from a novel point of view, namely, that of the institutional capabilities of Bismarckian welfare states to reinvent themselves and to successfully adapt to an era of austerity and open economic competition. After a brief introduction aiming at signaling the main characteristics of Spain from the political and economic point...

In one telling, the contemporary welfare reform narrative about poor families with children is straightforward. Passage of the Family Support Act (FSA) by Congress in 1988 challenged states to strengthen policies requiring welfare recipients to work or prepare for work. At the state level, a plethora of waiver-based reform activities subsequently pushed the work agenda much further than FSA req...

This paper examines the influence of the Troika on the retrenchment and reform of social security in Ireland during its bailout between 2010 and 2013. To do this, it draws on data from in-depth interviews with senior civil servants and civil society organisation staff who met with the Troika as part of their quarterly missions to Ireland during this period. The key themes which emerged from the...

Ð The policy problems posed by a lack of state capacity in developing societies now attract the attention of a growing number of scholars. Both the government failure paradigm, with its ``top-down'' emphasis, and the social capital theory, with its stress on ``bottom-up'' approaches, provide analytical frameworks that can be used to comprehend the symptoms of state incapacity reported by the mu...

This article discusses the current social policy reform process in Turkey from a gender perspective. Until now, social security and labour regulations have provided women with special benefits and protections. Depending on the particular case, these gender-specific policies can be interpreted differently – as positive discrimination, satisfying practical gender interests, or as a reinforcement ...

This article offers a review of welfare reform evaluation studies, summarizing research that has generated a consensus among mainstream policy analysts that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) has had few effects beyond caseload reductions and increases in employment. Given that supporters and opponents alike expected the law to have profound con...