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.

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

This study addresses the urgent need for low-carbon energy transition (LCET) in the Global South, where vulnerability to climate change is high and most countries have ratified the Paris Agreement and Nationally Determined Contributions. It emphasizes the importance of research in supporting this transition, particularly through the lens of digital technologies. Despite its relevance, existing studies on the topic remain limited and fragmented. This study reviews the literature on digital infrastructure in LCET, identifies key gaps and ambiguities and offers insights to inform future research and policymaking in the Global South.