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Do Social-Welfare Policies Reduce Poverty? A Cross-National Assessment
Open accessAbstract
Most social scientists, policymakers, and citizens who support the welfare state do so in part because they believe social-welfare programs help to reduce the incidence of poverty. Yet a growing number of critics assert that such programs in fact fail to decrease poverty, because too small a share of transfers actually reaches the poor, or because such programs create a welfare/poverty trap, or because they weaken the economy. This study assesses the effects of social-welfare policy extensiveness on poverty rates across fifteen affluent industrialized nations over the period 1960–91, using both absolute and relative measures of poverty. The results strongly support the conventional view that social-welfare programs reduce poverty.
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Cited by
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Coburn, D. (2000) · Social Science & Medicine · doi:10.1016/s0277-9536(99)00445-1 · Cited by 488
Welfare-state decommodification in 18 OECD countries: a replication and revision
Scruggs, L., & Allan, J. (2006) · Journal of European Social Policy · doi:10.1177/0958928706059833 · Cited by 488
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Brooks, C., & Manza, J. (2006) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/000312240607100306 · Cited by 358
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Metadata
- Authors
- Kenworthy, L.
- Venue
- Social Forces
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Published
- 1999-03-01
- Volume
- 77
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 1119-1119
- ISSN
- 0037-7732 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2162626903
- Cited by
- 415
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 41.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
