Domestic cats (Felis catus) are favoured companion animals, but also highly effective predators that have caused substantial declines and extinctions of native fauna in many places where they have been introduced. In Australia, free-roaming pet cats kill hundreds of millions of native animals annually, contributing to one of the world’s most severe modern extinction crises. In response, policy, advocacy and public messaging has increasingly promoted responsible pet cat management, including containment, on the multiple grounds of biodiversity protection, public amenity, disease spread reduction, and benefits to cat health and welfare. A recent article by Glanville C, Hampton JO, and Sandøe P 2025 Calling a trade-off a trade-off in arguments for cat confinement. Animal Welfare 34: e65. https://doi.org/10.1017/awf.2025.10041. challenges this messaging, arguing that claiming welfare benefits from cat containment is wilfully or negligently misleading. Here, we respond to four central arguments advanced by Glanville et al. We argue that separating physical health from welfare is conceptually flawed; that containment, like free-roaming, involves welfare pros and cons to cats (and their prey) that must all be evaluated concurrently; that privileging a cat’s freedom to roam ignores the welfare and rights of the animals harmed by roaming cats; and that allegations of “bad faith” or deceptive messaging by containment advocates are unfounded and unhelpful. While acknowledging that containment requires enriched care from cat owners, any uncertainty regarding relative welfare outcomes of containment versus free-roaming for cats does not justify ignoring the clear and severe welfare and conservation harms imposed on other animals by free-roaming cats. In Australia, pet cat containment remains a pragmatic pathway that aligns conservation objectives with overall animal welfare.

Specialised AI hardware becomes economically obsolete much faster than conventional capital, so maintaining a given stock of compute requires high replacement investment. This paper studies the implications for growth, adjustment dynamics, and policy in a two-asset growth model in which AI capacity both raises productivity and produces digital services at low marginal cost. Calibrated to advanced economies, the model delivers two distinct adjustment speeds. AI capacity reverts relatively quickly, with a half-life of about seven quarters, while conventional capital adjusts over roughly a decade. When hardware is short-lived, even modest changes in gross spending can produce large swings in measured AI investment, despite only limited movements in the underlying stock. This helps explain the volatility often seen in specialised AI hardware investment cycles. Hardware durability also has first-order welfare effects. In the baseline calibration, a two-percentage-point fall in quarterly depreciation raises welfare by 0.36% in consumption-equivalent terms, while an equal-sized compute tax reduces the steady-state AI stock by around one-fifth.

Weaning is a significant event in the life of Sahiwal calves, often leading to notable behavioural and emotional changes. This study aimed to investigate the effects of dam–calf contact on behavioural responses and adaptability in Sahiwal calves, focusing on fear responses, social interactions and reactivity to humans. A total of 16 newborn calves were assigned to 2 rearing systems: fenceline mother-calf contact (FMC) and separated mother-calf (SM), with 8 calves in each group. The FMC group received natural suckling and fenceline contact with their dams, while the SM group was separated at birth and fed via nipple bottles. Behavioural assessments were conducted through a series of tests, including social reactivity tests, social preference tests, umbrella-based fear elicitation and interaction with a familiar human. Key behavioural parameters such as time spent idle, exploratory behaviour, escape attempts, vocalizations, latency to resume feeding and preference for conspecifics or humans were recorded. Data were statistically analysed using independent t-tests to compare behavioural responses between groups. The results revealed distinct behavioural differences between the FMC and SM calves, indicating that dam contact influences social behaviour, reduces fearfulness and improves calves’ adaptability to novel or stressful situations.

This article examines the evolving dynamics of migration control in the European Union, where traditional state borders are being redefined. As governance shifts to private and local actors, healthcare access increasingly serves as a tool of internal bordering, regulating migrant mobility and social rights within different welfare state models. Focusing on the experiences of free-moving EU migrants in Germany, Sweden, and the UK (an EU member at the time of this study), the research shows how healthcare provision selectively includes or excludes migrants. The findings reveal that these bordering strategies vary by welfare state model: the liberal welfare state model, as seen in the UK, aligns more closely with the EU’s ideal of free mobility, while the social-democratic model, exemplified by Sweden, struggles to accommodate this type of mobility, highlighting significant tensions in the EU’s commitment to universal access.

Drawing upon a large longitudinal qualitative study on lived experiences of food aid in England, we question contemporary academic and policy categorisations and portrayals of food aid. Contrary to ideas of a diverse food aid sector offering choice and dignity, we identify clear uniformity in the language participants use to describe different forms of food charity; any organisation which offers food for free or at very low cost to take away is predominantly described as a ‘food bank’. Simultaneously, however, we find marked inequalities in lived experiences of food charity by gender, age and race and ethnicity, and clear indications that demographically oriented exclusion is ever-present in food aid. We argue that the key fault line shaping lived experiences of the UK community food sector is not the ‘type’ of provision but demography (age, gender and parenthood, race and ethnicity) and yet inequalities remain broadly ignored in discussions of UK food aid. In doing so, we provide a critical contribution to scholarship on the changing nature of welfare pluralism and the lived experience of poverty today.

In Western Europe, as immigration flows increase – or at least become more salient – and austerity measures place welfare states under pressure, policy reforms that extend or restrict access to the welfare state for immigrants are highly contested. Much academic attention has been paid to restrictive or ‘welfare chauvinist’ policy reforms and the role played by far‐right parties and sympathisers in the policy‐making process. Yet, left‐wing parties, often considered the most susceptible to the ‘progressive's dilemma’ between open borders and strong welfare states, remain under‐researched. Using new data on immigrant welfare rights for 14 European countries from 1980 to 2018, and differentiating between social democrats, the greens and far‐left parties, we show that social democrats engage in both reforms that restrict as well as expand, but on average, they tend to be negatively associated with immigrant welfare rights. However, our evidence shows that context matters: We find that that social democrats are less likely to retrench immigrant welfare rights when they share power with the far left, and become more likely to retrench as unemployment rises.

The government of the Communist Party of China (CPC) rolled out a national policy to contract out social and welfare services to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in 2013. This study explores how government contracting of services affects NGOs. We examine three areas: marketization, financial dependency, and autonomy. We find significant convergence of the effects of contracting on NGOs in China with NGOs’ experiences in liberal democratic countries, despite divergent political regimes. Found effects are explained by the combination of the authoritarian government of the CPC with the neoliberal governance structures introduced by contracting. Convergence with international experience despite divergent political regimes is attributed to the neoliberal essence of the policy of contracting of services.

Contemporary ageing policy often constructs demographic change as a challenge requiring urgent intervention. While ageing is not seen as a problem per se, in policy debate it is often presented as a crisis. Consequently, countries and institutions have sought to identify solutions to the represented problem. A common policy response in Western nations has been to focus on individual activity as a solution. The implications of such developments are, however, seldom explicitly discussed. This article focuses on Finland, a country often positioned as a Nordic welfare state. Using the post-structuralist approach ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be’ (WPR), it examines problems of and solutions to changing demographics represented in Finnish policy, highlighting the implications for older adults and their care. From an analysis of 42 governmental policy and related documents (2002-2024), 11 documents (2008-2024) were selected for detailed examination concerning the health and social care of older adults. The analysis shows that the predominant responsibility for care of older adults is laid on older adults themselves, their family members and peers, while the responsibility of the state is largely silenced. The article highlights the wider analytical, policy and practice implications of neo-liberal ageing policy and discusses how older adults are governed through policy in the midst of the absent interaction between policy, conceptual debates and everyday life material realities through a three-level conceptual model. This absence is not merely a gap but a mode of governance that reflects broader neo-liberal shifts in welfare policy.

Governments depend on nonprofit, voluntary sector organisations to deliver social and community services, and public funding is the sector’s most important income source. However, in many countries, public funding for social services is becoming more limited, conditional and precarious, and governments are encouraging nonprofits to diversify their funding base, and shift their reliance to income from market activity and private donations. This article is concerned with access to philanthropic and commercial funding among nonprofits, and the factors affecting it. It firstly discusses an emerging policy agenda to promote private funding among nonprofit community service providers. Then, multivariate analysis of survey data from 521 Australian nonprofits shows which organisations access income from client fees, business activities, community fundraising, and philanthropic foundations. By exploring inequalities in the distribution of these main sources of private funding, the article helps identify the types of organisations that face challenges in establishing and sustaining streams of private income, and which are likely to require ongoing public support.

Welfare is the largest expenditure category in all advanced democracies. Consequently, much literature has studied partisan effects on total and policy‐specific welfare expenditure. Yet, these results cannot be trusted: the methodological standard is to apply time‐series cross‐section regressions to annual observation data. But governments hardly change annually. Thus, the number of observations is artificially inflated, leading to incorrect estimates. While this problem has recently been acknowledged, it has not been convincingly resolved. This article proposes mixed‐effects models (also known as ‘multilevel models’ or ‘hierarchical models’) as a solution, which allows decomposing variance into different levels and permits complex cross‐classification data structures. It is argued that mixed‐effects models combine the strengths of existing methodological approaches while alleviating their weaknesses. Empirically, partisan effects on total and on disaggregated expenditure in 23 OECD countries in the period 1960–2012 are studied using several measures of party preferences and revealing several substantially relevant findings.

This article compares trust, political activeness, and associational participation of lower secondary students in 22 countries all over the world representing different political and welfare regimes. The analyses are based on the ICCS 2009 survey. Comparison between the countries shows that the level of trust and political activeness/level of association participation of 8th graders correlate negatively with each other whereas in adult populations the correlation is positive. The level of political and associational activeness was highest in the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Paraguay, and the lowest in Finland, Taiwan, Sweden, and Denmark. Moreover, young people in the Nordic countries are less interested in political and societal issues even though the level of their civic knowledge is highest of all the countries. Nordic 8th graders have a very high level of trust in other people and in institutions. Differences in the level and type of welfare state (especially the level of children’s welfare and their educational rights) are probably the most important social factors in the explanation of national differences. High level of child welfare tends to increase the level of 8th graders’ trust but decrease their association activeness. Bourdieu’s theoretical repertoire (especially the concept of the causality of the probable) was adopted in the interpretation of the differences in trust and political cum associational activeness between countries included in the analysis.

Research on differences between public, for-profit, and nonprofit providers of welfare services has provided mixed findings, depending on welfare state arrangement, regulation, and service area. This paper’s objective is to study the differences between public, nonprofit (cooperatives and other nonprofits), and for-profit welfare providers from the perspective of the users in the tightly regulated Scandinavian context. We ask how the users perceive the providers from different sectors differently and how this variation can be explained. The study relies on a large-scale survey carried out in 2015 in the city of Oslo, Norway. From the survey, we identify the two main results. First, despite limited differences, users of nonprofit kindergartens are generally more satisfied than users of for-profit and public kindergartens. Second, an important explanation for variations in user satisfaction among kindergartens is identified in a pocket of regulatory leniency: the quality of food service. This is the only expense that varies among kindergartens in Norway. These results indicate that more lenient regulations could potentially increase provider distinctiveness. Based on the existing literature, we discuss why nonprofit providers seem to fare better in the minds of users than public and for-profit providers.

In this paper, we develop a model economy to study how financial innovations affect financial access and inequality. Financial innovations alter distribution of costs. In this way, the measure of buyers is endogenous regarding the payment method. In studying financial innovations in an economy with limited commitment, it is possible to bridge two existing literatures. When comparing stationary equilibria, we find that the results depend on the scarcity of collateral. Moreover, the expected welfare and inequality are affected by consumers access to the form of payment systems.

This paper investigates the welfare implications of the rise of shadow banking in China, driven by regulatory arbitrage and implicit guarantees. Although shadow banking can improve social welfare by relaxing constraints on banks’ capacity to expand credit, it may also hurt social welfare due to the risk-taking behavior induced by implicit guarantees. We study the optimal level of guarantees and shadow banking in a model that balances these benefits and costs. Our findings suggest that reducing the existing degree of guarantees and shrinking the shadow banking sector could enhance social welfare in China.

How did populist governments handle the COVID-19 pandemic? Did they act as erratic, irrational and unsound – in short: ‘populist’ – as observers expected them to do? Through which social policies did they respond to the hardships caused by the pandemic? And, what does populist governance explain about these governments’ social policies? This article explores these questions through a comparative analysis of a diverse set of six populist governments. We first conceptualize, operationalize and measure populist governance by constructing a novel Populist Governance Index. Second, we describe and measure governments’ welfare policies through a novel Social Policy Response Index. Third, we relate social policy responses to variations in populist governance across countries. Our mixed-method study suggests that populism explains the politics rather than the policies of populist governments. We conclude that this is the case because populism fundamentally defines a mode of governance rather than policy content