Health, Education and Welfare Economics

Explains the challenges that collective welfare faces, and explores the complexities involved in delivering it, including debates about who benefits from welfare and how and where it is delivered.

A substantial, authoritative, third edition of this important textbook about the impact of economic priorities and pressures on social policies at a time when neo-liberal arguments for reducing the burden of welfare are more dominant than ever before.

Combining robust evidence with real-life stories, this book reveals the shocking impact of austerity policies on life expectancy and offers an optimistic vision of what can be done to restore life expectancy and reduce health inequality.

A Sharing Economy proposes radical new ways to close the UK’s growing income gap and spread social opportunities. A new social wealth fund would boost economic and social investment and simultaneously strengthen the public finances and offer a powerful antidote to austerity.

Two strategies that governments have to help people on low incomes - providing them with financial support directly, and encouraging them to earn more - generally conflict. This report provides new evidence on the trade-off between redistributing income and improving work incentives.

FREE PDF version available online at www.jrf.org.uk

This book examines poverty in the context of the economy, society and the political community, considering how states can respond to issues of inequality, exclusion and powerlessness. Drawing on examples in both rich and poor countries, this is an accessible contribution to the debate about the nature of poverty and responses to it.

The recent focus on reducing child poverty stems mainly from worries about the future consequences of poverty on children's later achievement. This report explores the link between childhood poverty and poverty later in life, and asks whether this link has grown stronger or weaker in recent decades. Free PDF available at www.jrf.org.uk

This much-needed book analyses the social, economic and labour market advantages of a Citizen's Income in the UK. It also contains international comparisons and links with broader issues around the meaning of poverty and inequality, making a valuable contribution to the debate around benefits.

This book offers Ireland’s introduction of a welfare-to-work market as a case study that speaks to wider international debates in social and public policy about the role of market governance in intensifying the turn towards more regulatory and conditional welfare models on the ground.

The help we give to others can be more effective and more just if we cultivate greater levels of compassion. Jason Wood reviews the research and talks to experts from across the world to make the moving case for greater compassion in public life.

Inequality has at last taken centre stage in the political discourse, but there is very little to explain the inequality debates and to offer solutions for the UK. This introductory book provides a comprehensive survey of all the available evidence, looking at both sides of the inequality argument.

Much of the recent policy debate surrounding poverty in Britain focuses on income as a measure of living standards. In this report we consider one alternative to income for measuring poverty that has been largely overlooked in the mainstream poverty debate in the UK: namely household expenditure. Free PDF version available at www.jrf.org.uk