Family policies are a comparatively late addition to social policies and they have been developed mainly within Europe. Public, state intervention into family matters, through different kind of legal norms concerning marriage, filiation, inheritance, schooling obligations, working age and so forth however, has a much longer and broader history. The goals, as well as the instruments, of family p...

Though the potential benefits of broadband Internet adoption are great, the levels of take-up vary greatly around the world. Some governments have adopted aggressive policies to deploy broadband networks and to encourage the use of these applications, while others have not. In the former cases, governments are motivated to promote broadband adoption in order to realize both economic and social ...

The global effort toward sustainable development has initiated a transition in water management. Water utility companies use water-pricing policies as an instrument for controlling residential water demand. To support policy makers in their decisions, the authors have developed DAWN, a hybrid model for evaluating water-pricing policies. DAWN integrates an agent-based social model for the consum...

(UNRISD) is an autonomous agency engaging in multidisciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary problems affecting development. Its work is guided by the conviction that, for effective development policies to be formulated, an understanding of the social and political context is crucial. The Institute attempts to provide governments, development agencies, grassroots organizatio...

The global resurgence of interest in the social determinants of health provides an opportunity for determined action on unacceptable and unjust health inequalities that exist within and between countries. This paper reviews three categories of social inclusion policies: cash-transfers; free social services; and specific institutional arrangements for programme integration in six selected countr...

INTRODUCTION The aim of the paper is to examine the role of income inequality and redistribution for income-related health inequalities in Europe. This paper contributes in two ways to the literature on macro determinants of socio-economic inequalities in health. First, it widens the distinctive focus of the research field on welfare state regimes to quantifiable measures such as social policy ...

Policy languages (such as privacy and rights) have had little impact on the wider community. Now that Social Networks have taken off, the need to revisit Policy languages and realign them towards Social Networks requirements has become more apparent. One such language is explored as to its applicability to the Social Networks masses. We also argue that policy languages alone are not sufficient ...

This article analyzes different factors leading to economic and social disparities: the relationship between economic growth and inequality; the linkage between social disparities and environmental degradation; inequalities caused by globalization; gender discrimination and its impacts on economic growth; corruption damaging sound economic development and leading to more social disparities, etc...

We examine the impact of institutional quality and social capital on aid effectiveness. We find strong evidence that social capital and institutions enhance aid effectiveness. Moreover, once we account for the role of social capital and institutions, the impact of policies tend to disappear. These findings have important policy implications as they indicate that conditioning aid allocation on ‘...

This paper combines ideas from several branches of the social sciences into an economic model of college enrollment, following recent theoretical work by Akerlof and Kranton (2002). Basic to the model are notions of “fitting in,” social status, and investments in human capital during high school. After using the NELS data and maximum likelihood estimation to uncover the behavioral parameters of...