Global Social Policy

This article presents the first measurement of multidimensional child poverty at the regional level in East Asia and the Pacific and is based on child poverty studies in seven countries in the region: Cambodia, Lao PDR, Mongolia, Philippines, Thailand, Vanuatu and Viet Nam. It examines the prevalence of child poverty, as per the Bristol deprivation approach, in the seven countries, as well as the extent of various types of disparities within these countries. A composite measure, the Child Poverty Index, is also applied. Findings reveal that widespread and severe deprivation is being faced by children in one subset of countries (Cambodia, Lao PDR and Mongolia), while the other subset of countries (Philippines, Thailand, Vanuatu and Viet Nam) is confronted with pockets of deprived child populations and the issue of less severe deprivation. Alternative policy approaches to reduce child poverty in these two subsets of study countries are also discussed.

Migration flows, regional integration and social transformation are increasingly interlinked. This article seeks to provide some clarification of these processes through a global North–South comparative approach. The authors problematize regional integration and regionalization but also the legal or rights-based approach to migration, now emerging as the dominant progressive paradigm. They propose a social transformation perspective that foregrounds the role of social movements – in this case the trade unions – in relation to migration in a regional context. This would pose an alternative form of promoting the cause of migrant workers within a mobilizing perspective which prioritizes the agency of non-state actors such as trade unions. In brief, migrants can be viewed from a citizenship optic and as bearers of individual rights but also, the authors propose, as workers who can organize collectively to pursue their objectives.

This article argues that the Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAPs) that came with loans to peripheral Eurozone members Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and now Cyprus, are very similar to the loans with conditionality, also known as Structural Adjustment Programs, that international financial institutions used as a policy tool in the 1980s and 1990s. It defines structural adjustment programs and then shows how Eurozone rules plus the EAPs resemble them. It then canvasses the literature evaluating structural adjustment in the developing world in order to formulate expectations for its performance in Europe. The conclusions from the large literature on structural adjustment policies suggest that the EAPs will: be badly implemented; be neutral or bad for growth; be bad for equity and the poor; have unpredictable policy consequences; and will allow incumbent elites to preserve their positions. Preliminary evidence from the four peripheral countries confirms that the same problems are afflicting EAPs.

Among welfare programmes public pension schemes have been particularly subject to cost-containment. Various countries have been exposed to relatively similar pressures such as ageing populations or growing unemployment. The literature on comparative welfare states tends to highlight the significance of domestic factors in mediating the influence of these pressures. This article instead explores the policy impact of international financial institutions (IFIs) including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU) on the reform of old-age pension systems in Greece and Turkey. It suggests that in both countries, IFIs have helped to trigger the process of reforms and to spread the global pension orthodoxy. Although the pension schemes still diverge in institutional structure and benefit provision, in both cases adoption of the pension orthodoxy of individualisation of pension rights has followed the advice tendered by the IFIs.

This article investigates the rationale that informs the global engagement of private foundations and addresses the question of to what extent and in what way they have the power to (autonomously) shape global social and health policy in line with their convictions even when others disagree or could be expected to disagree. Following a conceptual discussion of power and taking malaria policy as the basis of a historical comparison between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation, the article shows that private foundations are impressively successful in promoting their vision of social and health problems while downplaying potential conflicts and passing over alternatives to their policy prescriptions. Moreover, the foundations can draw on their status as private actors in order to assert autonomy for their own actions even though their ultimate goal is to affect the policies of others – those of the public sector in particular. While the foundations’ power is originally based on their monetary resources that often serve as leverage for the mobilization of external resources, their funding of research and interventions helps them in the long run to even develop authority in their field of engagement. With a view to malaria policy it is noteworthy that both foundations analysed were successful in shaping policy in line with their convictions but limited their take on the malaria problem to ‘safe issues’ and marginalized other perspectives. In particular, they promoted a biomedical rather than a social understanding of health problems, they preferred time-limited investments over sustained spending, and they favoured solutions that promised readily recognizable results. Both foundations brought this biomedical-managerial frame to its logical end when they developed a preoccupation with malaria eradication and shaped global policies accordingly while others pointed at the less obvious dangers and problems of this seemingly persuasive approach.