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This paper presents new evidence on the effects of the minimum wage using Brazilian monthly household and firm panel data between 1982 and 2000. By examining the effects on wages, employment and prices together we are able to provide an explanation for the small employment effects prevalent in the literature. Our principal finding is that increasing the minimum wage raises wages and prices with small adverse employment effects. This suggests a general wage-price inflationary spiral, where persistent inflation offsets some of the wage gains. The main policy implication deriving from these results is that the potential of the minimum wage for the policy maker as a tool to help the poor is bigger under low inflation. Under high inflation, the resulting wage-price spiral makes the minimum wage increase – as well as its antipoverty policy potential – short lived. In this case, the wage effects are volatile and the permanent scars are lower employment and higher inflation in Brazil.

A growing body of work suggests that welfare and punishment should be understood as alternative, yet interconnected ways of governing poor and marginalized populations. While there is considerable evidence of a punitive turn in welfare and penal institutions over the past half century, recent studies show that welfare and carceral institutions increasingly comanage millions of people caught at the intersection of the welfare and penal sectors. The growth of “mass supervision” and the expansion of the social services sector help explain the blurring of welfare and punishment in the United States in daily practice. We suggest that these developments complicate the idea of an institutional trade-off and contend that welfare and punishment are best understood along a continuum of state management in which poor and socially marginalized populations are subjected to varying degrees of support, surveillance, and sanction. In presenting the punishment–welfare continuum, we pay particular attention to the “murky middle” between the two spheres: an interinstitutional space that has emerged in the context of mass supervision and a social services–centric safety net. We show that people caught in the “murky middle” receive some social supports and services, but also face pervasive surveillance and control and must adapt to the tangle of obligations and requirements in ways that both extend punishment and limit their ability to successfully participate in mainstream institutions.

We examine the relationship between the business cycle and poverty for the period from 1960 to 2008 using income data from the Current Population Survey and consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new evidence on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and poverty is of particular interest, given recent changes in antipoverty policies that have placed greater emphasis on participation in the labor market and in-kind transfers. We look beyond official poverty, examining alternative income poverty and consumption poverty, which have conceptual and empirical advantages as measures of the well-being of the poor. We find that both income and consumption poverty are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions. A 1 percentage point increase in unemployment is associated with an increase in the after-tax income poverty rate of 0.9–1.1 percentage points in the long run, and an increase in the consumption poverty rate of 0.3–1.2 percentage points in the long run. The evidence on whether income is more responsive to the business cycle than consumption is mixed. Income poverty does appear to be more responsive using national level variation, but consumption poverty is often more responsive to unemployment when using regional variation. Low percentiles of both income and consumption are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions, and in most cases, low percentiles of income appear to be more responsive than low percentiles of consumption.

Using regional incomes as the reference group, disposable income poverty rates are computed for the two most recent waves of Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data available for the following countries: Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition, we aggregate the regions of the five western European countries we examine so that we can better assess the effectiveness of Europe's efforts to reduce the economic gaps between regions. We find that the countries we examine have patterns of regional poverty that help us better understand the national aggregate measures, and we are able identify areas where antipoverty efforts should be made a priority.

It has been over a decade since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was passed in 1996 with the intention of “ending welfare as we know it.” The main cash assistance entitlement program that had been in place since the 1930s, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was eliminated in favor of the non-entitlement Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. This drastic change occurred at a time of economic growth, where employment and wages rose across the United States. Initially, caseloads fell dramatically.

Governance is becoming an increasingly important concept in European theoretical debates and in political practice as a new way to manage public policies, since the public sector reforms in the 1980s. However, the debate in Latin America has different characteristics than in Europe, so it is necessary to provide a critical review of the proposed agenda for the transformation of the state in the region, and of the transfer of the concept of governance by multilateral agencies. To understand these changes, this chapter examines three key areas of reforms in Latin America and the privatization of public services, new social policy proposals, and the decentralization process. This will help us understand the tension between normative models and specific patterns of governance that prevail in Latin America.

I trace and explain how the ratcheting of corporate mergers and deregulation transformed the structure of elite relations in the United States from 1960 to 2010. Prior to the 1970s there was a high degree of elite unity and consensus, enforced by Federal regulation and molded by structure of U.S. government, around a set of policies and practices: interventionism abroad, progressive tax rates, heavy state investment in infrastructure and education, and a rising level of social spending. I find that economic decline, the loss of geopolitical hegemony, and mobilization from the left and right are unable to account for the specific policies that both Democratic and Republican Administrations furthered since the 1970s or for the uneven decline in state capacity that were intended and unintended consequences of the post-1960s political realignment and policy changes. Instead, the realignment and restructuring of elites and classes that first transformed politics and degraded government in the 1970s in turn made possible further shifts in the capacities of American political actors in both the state and civil society. I explain how that process operated and how it produced specific policy outcomes and created new limits on mass political mobilization while creating opportunities for autarkic elites to appropriate state powers and resources for themselves.