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This chapter explores correspondences between the costs and benefits of financial and circus safety nets. The author stresses the idea that the character of a country's net cannot be static. It must adapt promptly to changes in the market, legal, bureaucratic, and ethical problems it is intended to alleviate.

Safety nets expand over time for two reasons. First, large firms whose operations lie formally outside the net have strong incentives to make themselves too difficult for authorities to fail and unwind in crisis circumstances. Second, in good times, safety-net managers underinvest in crisis planning. As a result, crisis-generated changes in the ordering of regulatory norms dispose them to rescue firms that are difficult to fail and unwind without holding themselves closely accountable for either the costs or the distributional effects of the subsidies the rescue engenders.

The purpose of this paper is to find the determinants of participation and targeting efficiency of the following safety net programs in West Bengal: Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), self-targeted program; National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM), subsidy based livelihood program; Indira Awaas Yojona (IAY), targeted cash transfer program and Public Distribution System (PDS), targeted in kind transfer program.

The study is based on a household survey comprising 900 households across three Districts: Murshidabad, Nadia and Burdwan.

Benefits from MNREGA and PDS are not substantial, whereas financial benefits are substantial from NRLM and IAY. This paper shows that poor people have higher likelihood of participation in MNREGA and PDS. But, non poor get disproportionate benefits from IAY and NRLM both have been designed for the poor. Therefore, targeting cannot remove elite capture altogether. Socially down trodden section have higher participation in MNREGA and PDS, whereas people who are at upper tier of social hierarchy enjoy the benefits of IAY and NRLM. However, it cannot be said that these programs miss their target completely.

The study suffers from the usual limitations of sampling.

Programs targeted for the poor are being appropriated by the non poor. If there is better targeting money will be channelized to the desired beneficiaries and welfare will be enhanced.

The study has unearthed the underlying reasons behind why some safety net programs have better targeting and some safety net programs have poor targeting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the household registration and of employment contract on employee job insecurity in the Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The relationships between job satisfaction and the two components of job insecurity are also analysed.

The research uses original data collected through a questionnaire survey in six Chinese SOEs. In all, 309 samples are analysed mainly using hierarchical regression analysis.

The research finds household registration is a predictor of job insecurity while employment contract is not. Job satisfaction is found to be positively related to one of the components of job insecurity: the perceived severity of job loss.

To improve job security of the employees who are in vulnerable positions, improving the equality of social safety net is significant. In China, household registration causes unequal access to social welfare and employment opportunities; improving the equality may be more significant than seeking for permanent employment.

The research suggests two levels of factors influencing job insecurity: the macro-level factors that include the institutional configurations of social safety net; and the micro-level factors that include employment contract. The macro-level factors have fundamental influence while the micro-level factors are more apparent. The micro-level factors may manifest their influence only when the macro-level factors equally cover all the employees. The macro-level factors may also intermediate the relationship between job insecurity and satisfaction.

This paper explains the value of interpreting the design of a country's financial safety net as an exercise in incomplete social contracting.

Safety net contracts unlucky financial institutions and customers to transfer some or all of what would otherwise be ruinous losses to taxpayers in other sectors. Their capacity to do this is based on a series of unspoken and slowly varying cultural norms that govern when government support is supplied to an insolvent bank, in what forms, on what terms and under what limitations. Identifying these norms is the purpose of this paper. Identifying similarities in the norms that hold sway in the United States and China is the main contribution this paper has to offer.

Regulators do not want to face the consequences of challenging large insolvent banks' claims that funding problems that their managers know to be hopeless reflect a spate of reversible bad luck and a temporary shortfall in liquidity. In hopes of shifting the problem forward to their successors, regulators forbear from meaningful intervention until and unless crisis-driven depositor runs force them into action.

This means that much like US rescue arrangements, one can demonstrate that the Chinese safety net is incomplete in four ways. It does not fully delineate the events that trigger a loss transfer. It sets formal but imperfectly enforceable limits on the size of potential loss transfers. The political obligations that actually persuade state actors to bail out major banks in a crisis are largely implicit and optional in timing, magnitude and transparency. Finally, the identity of the citizens who will be forced to absorb the costs of crisis bailouts is also optional. Who pays and how they do so will be determined in part during the crisis but will not be finalized until well after the crisis has blown over.

The analysis makes it clear that authorities, express commitment to fair and efficient modes of financial supervision is destined to break down under crisis pressure unless the disadvantaged equity stake that the safety net assigns to taxpayers is rebalanced to record and collect taxpayers' deserved share of the profits a country's megabanks book during booms.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many households to experience income shocks because of the unprecedented job loss, resulting in the demand for public and private food assistance programs and a surge in unemployment insurance filing in the USA. This study aims to investigate the association between social safety programs (e.g. supplementary nutritional assistance programs (SNAP), unemployment insurance and charitable food assistance) and household food sufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

The authors used the Household Pulse Surveys (HPS) conducted by the US Census Bureau from August 2020 to March 2021. And, the authors used an ordered probit model for the empirical analysis because the indicator of food sufficiency constructed from the HPS is an ordinal variable with four categories. The indicator identifies four groups of households: severe food insufficiency, moderate food insufficiency, mild food sufficiency and food sufficiency.

The results show that food sufficiency is significantly higher among the SNAP, unemployment insurance and charitable food assistance recipients than non-recipients. Furthermore, the results indicate that food sufficiency is significantly lower among black, Asian, Hispanic and other races than white households. Concerning the intersectional effect of social safety net programs and race/ethnicity on household food sufficiency, the authors find that the household food sufficiency is significantly higher among white, black and Asian households who benefited from SNAP, compared with non-beneficiary households. On the other hand, the authors find no evidence that participation in SNAP increases food sufficiency significantly among Hispanics and other races. In addition, the likelihood of food sufficiency increases significantly among white, black, Asian, Hispanic and other races that received unemployment insurance and charitable food assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with those who did not benefit from the programs.

These results underscore the critical role collective America’s social safety net programs played in increasing food sufficiency among Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the results suggest that families' basic needs (food sufficiency) would have been at risk if these safety net programs were not available to households during the pandemic. This, therefore, highlights the important role that government- and non-government-supported food emergency assistance programs can play in preventing people from facing food insufficiency problems in a tough time or during a crisis in the USA.

This study highlights the dynamic relationship between Americans’ social safety net programs and household food sufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

Community health clinics serving the poor and underserved are geographically expanding due to changes in U.S. health care policy. This paper describes the experience of a collaborative alliance of health care providers in a large metropolitan area who develop a conceptual and mathematical decision model to guide decisions on expanding its network of community health clinics.

Community stakeholders participated in a collaborative process that defined constructs they deemed important in guiding decisions on the location of community health clinics. This collaboration also defined key variables within each construct. Scores for variables within each construct were then totaled and weighted into a community-specific optimal space planning equation. This analysis relied entirely on secondary data available from published sources.

The model built from this collaboration revolved around the constructs of demand, sustainability, and competition. It used publicly available data defining variables within each construct to arrive at an optimal location that maximized demand and sustainability and minimized competition.

This is a model that safety net clinic planners and community stakeholders can use to analyze demographic and utilization data to optimize capacity expansion to serve uninsured and Medicaid populations.

Communities can use this innovative model to develop a locally relevant clinic location-planning framework.

The paper seeks to explore the importance of a sample of New Zealand farmers' markets in providing a supportive setting for the take‐off as well as the decline stage of the small business life cycle, with a view to identifying factors that may enhance rural small business survivability.

The task was achieved by use of a combination of interviews and case studies. A list of new generation farmers' markets was compiled. Managers from four of these markets were interviewed to identify the possible existence of businesses that had been fostered by, but had now outgrown, the market. Four incubated businesses were selected from one of the longer established markets. From a more recently established market, 18 stallholders were selected for examination of their attitudes towards the market as a nurturing environment in relation to the life‐cycle stage of the business. Data were analysed using qualitative techniques of theme identification and analysis.

It was found that farmers' markets can have a role as small business incubators and safety nets, thus enhancing the survival chances of rural small businesses. This may be particularly useful where dwindling government subsidies and growing supermarket power result in declining incomes and reduced outlets for small‐scale farmers and rural producers.

The research findings are limited by the non‐random nature of the sampling procedure. In such an exploratory study, the main emphasis was on establishing the existence of the incubator and safety net functions. Further research is needed to establish the extent of these roles.

The research investigates a relatively unique setting of an unsubsidised agricultural sector.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of access to credit and safety nets on fertilizer adoption in rural Ethiopia.

A panel data set collected in 2005 and 2007 on 278 households and over 5,700 plots from the Southern Highlands of Ethiopia is examined. The authors developed a theoretical model relating input use and credit contract under third-party credit collateral agreement. The estimation is based on instrumental variables regressions to account for the endogeneity of credit access, and safety nets in fertilizer demand equation.

Despite increasing trends in fertilizer and improved varieties adoption since mid-2003, only 22 percent of the plots in the sample is actually received fertilizer. Households with more assets measured by livestock wealth are more likely to adopt fertilizer but less likely to participate in the local credit market as they have better savings that could be used to buy fertilizer/improved seeds without credit contract. This suggests poorer farmers heavily depend on credit than wealthier. Participation in safety nets programs did not contribute for increased use of fertilizer suggesting that the program either competes with agricultural labor or the low wage income was not enough to pay for farm inputs.

The findings show that with a heavier reliance on credit by poorer farmers it appears that much might be gained by targeting policies toward increasing credit access to this group.

Studies that utilize repeated plot- and household-level observations are limited. To the knowledge, this is the first study showing the relationship between credit accesses, public work program and fertilizer adoption over time in rural Ethiopia.