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Workers in the United States who lose their job may benefit from temporary assistance programs and may apply for Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). We measure whether participation in four temporary assistance programs (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Unemployment Insurance (UI), and Temporary Disability Insurance programs (TDI)) influence application for DI, SSI, and re-employment. We instrument temporary assistance participation using variation in policies across states and over time. Results from our instrumental variables models suggest that increased access to UI benefits reduces applications for DI. This result is robust to different sensitivity checks. We also find less robust evidence that UI participation increases the probability of return to work and reduces the probability of claiming SSI benefits. In contrast, some of our results suggest a positive effect of SNAP participation on claiming SSI.

Extreme events are the occasion for many people’s encounters with climate change. Though causation is complex and no one event is directly attributable to climate change, when we consider Cassandra, we can consider what people encounter in assistance after an extreme event. This chapter takes the case of assistance to displaced people after Katrina to explore how care and surveillance were intertwined. Methods include analysis of government documents as well as interviews. When we consider assistance people receive, we often focus on the intended assistance and how it worked or did not. Evaluation is difficult, not least because criteria for determining what it means to work are uncertain. However, if we include the process of gaining assistance as part of the experience, we broaden concerns from the instrumental outcomes to the mixed messages people get in assistance. Assistance appears in a context, where the most vulnerable people have reasons to mistrust government and nonprofits, and where in the United States assistance has come intertwined with supervisory rules, a focus on getting people to work, and a need to manage criminal histories. Trust in government may be limited, emergency care can operate outside ordinary legal frameworks when providers are new, and legal accountability for assistance may be experienced as confining, despite caregivers’ intent.

This paper aims to review the institutional evolution of China's rural social security system in the past 35 years, focusing on major policy transformations of the rural social security system in a large country, and extract the Chinese experience on developing rural social security.

This paper systematically reviews the evolution of rural social security system via organizing policy documents, key events and research literature on the construction of rural social security since the Reform and Opening-up.

First, institutional transformation is a profound change in China's rural social security system; second, policy transformation has taken place in the main areas of China's rural social security system, including rural endowment insurance, medical insurance and social assistance; third, the policy evolution of China's rural social security system has a unique experience in a large country.

China is the country with the largest rural population in the world. The process and experience of transforming the social security system in the vast rural areas of China have important value and reference significance for other developing countries.

Children in Malaysia, just as children in many other countries, are vulnerable to poverty. They are exposed to different forms of deprivation and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated their predicament. Concerns have been raised about the impact of the pandemic on children’s well-being, as this health crisis had intensified the educational and economic disparities among children in Malaysia, and for some children the impact will be lifelong. It is important to recognise the multidimensionality of poverty in regard to deprivation among poor children; however, such concerns are less pronounced in public policy discussions. Demands for greater policy attention intensified following the increasing number of unemployed parents and bereaved children who lost their parents due to the pandemic. The scope of poverty alleviation policies failed to consider the varying poverty gaps between recipients and the various forms of deprivation experienced by children in poor and larger sized households. As a result, the allocation of funds for the improvement of children’s well-being has been insignificant. The aim of this chapter is to provide a thorough overview of child poverty in developed and developing countries and how child poverty has changed in Malaysia. The analysis in this chapter seeks to provide deep insights on the development of policies that address poverty among children in Malaysia. An analysis on budget appropriations reveals that efforts to address other dimensions of child development were steadily improved, but policy commitments for such purposes need to be intensified in the post-pandemic era when hundreds of thousands of families and children have been plunged into poverty. It is timely for policymakers to acknowledge the need for separate policy considerations for children since they experience poverty differently from adults. The fulfilment of their needs should be prioritised, and the recognition of this fact would produce desirable plans of action for children living in poverty.

This study aims to examine how temporary relocation areas (TRAs), urban forms that facilitate evictions and forced relocations, have been written into South African legal and governmental structures through contested urban planning and legal regimes.

Proceeding from the macro-scale of TRAs spread across the nation, to the mezzo-scale of the Delft Symphony Way TRA in Cape Town, to the micro-scale of an individual “blikkie” (housing unit) within this camp, the article looks at the form and function of the TRA in urban resettlement practices. Special attention is given to relocation areas’ designation as “temporary” spaces and the consequences of this temporal designation in law and on the ground.

These sites have developed as technologies for negotiating competing demands on the state, and their presence foregrounds some of the deeply rooted contradictions in post-apartheid South Africa. They are places both within and apart from the city, often managed by city officials according to municipal specifications, but located proximally to key urban amenities, utilities services and employment centers. They also place contradictory demands on their residents, for whom making the TRA liveable also legitimates it as a form of housing.

This article uncovers several concerns about TRAs, including their inadequacy for long-term settlement, their problematic usage as tools of dispossession and the spatial-material-legal imbrications by which TRAs exist, persist and act back upon both individual lives and policy spheres.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the Italian anti-trafficking system by examining its effectiveness in the protection of trafficked people.

The article examines the protection of trafficked people in Italy, focusing in particular on the implementation of Article 18 of the “Consolidated Act of Measures Governing Immigration and Norms on the Condition of Foreign Citizens” (Legislative Decree n. 286/1998), which provides victims with protection and a residence permit independent of their cooperation with the competent authorities in criminal proceedings against offenders.

The article demonstrates that, though the Italian legal framework on trafficking is considered one of the most innovative and advanced, especially in the area of victim protection, a number of inadequacies in its implementation undermine the effectiveness of the measures aimed at protecting trafficked people. These concern the absence of a clear and appropriate victim identification procedure; the lack of adequate training in trafficking among professionals; the incomplete application of a procedure called the “social path” for the issuing of the residence permit; the narrow interpretation by competent authorities of the requirements for the residence permit granted to victims; the long lapse of time for the issuing of the residence permit; difficulties in the conversion of the residency permit granted to victims into a work permit; and the scarcity of economic resources.

The article contributes to scientific and political debates on the effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies.

Welfare reform banned newly arrived immigrants who came to the US after 1996 from receiving federally funded benefits for five years. One assessment of the success of the five-year ban is the effect it has on behaviors that determine economic success and the likelihood of becoming a public charge. In this chapter, we investigate the effect of the five-year ban on the employment, hours of work, and wages of low-income women. Our results indicate that welfare reform in general caused a significant increase in the employment of low-educated, unmarried mothers regardless of citizenship. Among non-citizens, welfare reform was associated with a 10 percentage point (26%) increase in employment, a two-hour (15%) increase in hours worked per week, and a 10 percent decrease in wages. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that the five-year ban had any additional effect on the employment, hours of work, and wages of low-educated and unmarried, non-citizen mothers.

Facing the aging workforce but older workers’ vulnerability in the labor market, this chapter empirically explores factors and policy implications to enhance older workers’ entered employment rates (EER) after exiting the national workforce program. After reviewing older workers’ attributes and the unique methods to train them, the chapter examines demographic, socioeconomic, and program attributions to older workers’ EER, controlling for cyclical changes in the labor market. The chapter relies on three sets of models including logistic regression, multi-level mixed-effect regression, and multilevel mixed effect logistic regression models, as well as longitudinal Workforce Investment Act Standardized Record Data and Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment data. Older dislocated workers and older adults are examined separately. Some Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act training and related service combinations are identified to contribute to older adults and older dislocated workers’ EER and to inform strategic decision-making about future allocations of funds and policy efforts to serve older workers.

This paper examines the effect of welfare reform policies on changes in poverty in the United States during 1992–2005. Using state-level panel data we estimate latent trajectory models to determine if welfare reform has contributed to changes in the trajectories of poverty growth (decline) beyond what would have naturally occurred through the passage of time. Our results show that (a) states vary considerably in both their mean initial level as well as trajectories of poverty; (b) welfare reform was responsible for nearly 27% of the decline in poverty during the study period; (c) the economy played a secondary role, responsible for a 10% reduction in poverty; and (d) income support policies like minimum wage and child support collection also had an important role to play, with the latter contributing as much as welfare reform to poverty reduction. Our estimates remain robust against changes in modeling strategies and methods.