In December 1997, South Australia's alternative care system was radically restructured along ‘funder-purchaser-provider’ lines. A recent progress report into the workings of the new system (Barber, Cooper and Delfabbro, 1999) identified high levels of frustration and dissatisfaction throughout the sector. This article argues that the current problems in alternative care are a legacy of policy decisions by successive state governments, some of which date back many years. The most important of these are the nationwide demise of residential care, the unhelpful role of the state under the ‘funder-purchaser-provider’ model, and the decision to outsource the entire foster care service through competitive tender. The article concludes that the state's policy preference for distancing itself from service delivery is incompatible with the community's growing reluctance to volunteer.

Japan has undergone drastic demographic changes in the past few decades. To cope with the needs of being an ageing society, the government has enacted a Long-term Care Insurance Law for the elderly that was implemented from 1 April 2000. The new legislation was conceived as a political compromise to appease two strongly opposed forces: reformists and the old guard. In the process of drafting reform, new political players, including ordinary citizens and mayors of small-scale municipal governments, have emerged. Two citizen action groups participated in the reform process, and succeeded in reflecting their preferences in its policymaking. The mayors who supported the new system started reforming social welfare administration systems, challenging traditional local politics. This article focuses on a few of these groups and how they have changed the Japanese political scene. It concludes that their political activities have contributed not only to promoting social policy reform, but also to revitalising politics in this country.

The recent concern to develop a radical but critical account of agency in social policy is to be welcomed. However this article questions whether the work of A. Giddens can provide an adequate foundation for such a project. Giddens's account of the welfare subject contains several weaknesses. It is voluntaristic and yet paradoxically it cannot offer an adequate understanding of radical change. It is also rationalistic and assumes the existences of a unitary and knowledgeable subject. As a consequence there is a danger that social policy develops a lop-sided model of agency which is insufficiently sensitive to the passionate, tragic and contradictory dimensions of human experience. A robust account of the active welfare subject must be prepared to confront the real experiences of powerlessness and psychic injury which result from injustice and oppression and acknowledge human capacities for destructiveness towards self and others. Only by exploring these different subject positions – victim, ‘own worst enemy’ and creative, reflexive agent – can we develop an understanding of the welfare subject which is optimistic without being naive.

Although the relationship between unemployment and poor mental well-being has long been an area of interest within behavioural science, the role of state intervention in the unemployment situation has not been thoroughly investigated. This article investigates how unemployment benefit systems and active labour market policy measures affect mental well-being among the unemployed in Sweden. The study uses a longitudinal and nationally representative survey of 3,500 unemployed Swedes. Three different types of active labour market policy measures involving the unemployed were studied, ‘activation’, ‘vocational training’ and ‘work-place participation’ measures. Of these only involvement in ‘workplace participation’ was found to have a clearly positive effect on mental well-being among those participating. Of the two Swedish unemployment benefit systems, the more generous income replacement Unemployment Benefits and the less generous flat rate Cash Unemployment Benefits, only access to income replacement Unemployment Benefits was found to mediate the mental well-being impact of unemployment. The positive effect of access to income replacement Unemployment Benefits was further accentuated when unemployment was prolonged. Those with access to this benefit system seemed to suffer no further deterioration of mental well-being, while the mental well-being of the rest of the unemployed further deteriorated.

This article analyses income transfers to elderly households in Korea and Taiwan in order to find out to what extent income maintenance policy contributes to the income of elderly households in these countries. It also examines private transfers to those households since we need to see the outcome of public policy in the broad picture of welfare mix. The article argues that private transfers play a bigger role than public transfers for elderly households. The poorer households are more dependent on private transfers. Nevertheless, private transfers failed to help the elderly escape poverty. It shows that elderly households in general and single- and couple-only households in particular are far more prone to poverty that the general population. Although state pensions are expected to play a bigger role in the future after coming into full operation, public policy has so far failed to improve the living standard of the elderly. This outcome of the research calls for urgent policy intervention to protect the elderly in the wake of the economic crisis in Korea and the massive earthquake in Taiwan.

The new Labour government in Britain has made the reduction of child poverty one of its central objectives. This article analyses the circumstances of children in poverty and describes the specific initiatives involved in Labour's approach and weighs them up in terms of their potential impact. The impact on child poverty of policies designed to raise incomes directly is analysed using micro-simulation modelling. A major emphasis of current policy is on the promotion of paid work, and we explore the potential for poverty reduction of increasing the employment of parents. The policies that address long-term disadvantage are also discussed and finally the whole programme is assessed and future strategy is considered.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health (formerly Health care)

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 The voluntary sector

10 Government (formerly Local government)

11 Gender

12 Demography