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Background Social support services such as day care centres are important in post-diagnostic dementia care to enable people living with dementia stay at home for longer. Little research has addressed potential inequalities in access, with no research on variations before and since COVID-19. The aim of this study was to explore inequalities in social support service usage before and since the pandemic. Methods Unpaid carers and people living with dementia were interviewed over the phone about their experiences of accessing social support services before and since the COVID-19 pandemic. Transcripts were analysed for key themes using inductive and deductive thematic analysis. Results Fifty participants (42 unpaid carers; eight people living with dementia) were interviewed, and five themes identified: (1) Service issues; (2) Access issues; (3) Relying on own initiative; (4) New inequalities due to COVID-19; and (5) Missing out on the benefits of support services. Participants reported transport, finances, and location as factors reducing their ability to access support service pre-COVID, with inequalities remaining and at times exacerbated since. Carers and people living with dementia also reported struggling with accessing basic necessities during COVID, including food and medicines. Conclusions Considering the benefits of accessing support services, resourced procedures and facilities are needed to maintain access to support services with more accessible remote support provision, enabling people from all backgrounds to access the care they need.

This article starts out with a summary of Weber's views on value freedom, by emphasizing: (1) that value freedom constitutes a special constellation of values; and (2) that value freedom makes it possible for the social scientist to theorize on the basis of new and more extensive knowledge than if she had simply stated her own values and focused the analysis around these. The latter point emerges most clearly in Weber's instructions for how a social scientist should proceed when carrying out an analysis of her own preferred social policy. After the section on Weber's views on value freedom, an attempt is made to update his views. This is done by arguing that the impact of values (and value freedom) differs, depending on where these can be found: on paper, in the head of the social scientist, or in her actions. "Actions," in the context of value freedom, refer to the research process and especially to the element of theorizing. Value freedom helps to guide the research into new and fruitful directions and to steer it clear of propaganda.

Paton critically assesses the political reasons behind the problems faced by the Health and Social eCare Bill based on the 2010 White Paper, Equity and Excellence; the resulting ‘pause’ in the legislative process; the emergence of the NHS Future Forum, David Cameron’s attempt to save face and rescue the Bill; and the contradictions and obfuscations within what became the Health and Social Care Act 2012, emerging from the Health Bill ‘Mark 2’ which was re-presented to Parliament after the ‘pause’. The House of Lords did its best to improve the legislation further, but the conflict between ‘competition’ and ‘integration’ was never satisfactorily solved. Even before the Act was operational, the Department of Health was seeking to make it manageable and ‘implementable’ by reining in supposedly key features such as the autonomy of local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and the more naive approaches to creating competitive markets which threatened, as in the 1990s, to damage effective clinical planning especially for specialised and regional services. Lansley’s replacement by Jeremy Hunt and the appointment of Simon Stevens as boss of NHS England helped a move away from the ethos of the 2012 Act, but it was not enough to create coherent policy and governance for the English NHS.

Over the past 15 years, government guidelines on social discounting for benefit–cost analysis have been updated in many different countries. These updates appear to reflect the influence of important academic contributions recommending the use of a declining term structure of discount rates. Using qualitative evidence from the United Kingdom, United States, France, and The Netherlands, this article shows that the influence of this academic supply side would not have been possible without the policy demand side and the presence of institutional or charismatic policy brokers acting as policy market makers. We argue that the market analogy is a useful framework for academics seeking to influence policy with their research.

Along our observation period from 2006 to 2015, the trend in many European countries is the combina­tion of rising labour market policy (LMP) spending on aggregate and declining spending per person want­ing to work. This means that even though the public faced an increased cost of LMP, the resources chan­nelled to the individual job seeker shrunk on average. As for the balance between active and passive (cash benefits) expenditure, we find no evidence of one crowding out the other. Expenditure on cash benefits and on ALMP remain highly correlated, with bene­fits receiving more resources in most countries. Much more than between ALMP- and PLMP-countries, we can distinguish between countries spending little and countries spending much on LMP. A higher GDP and a larger government budget correlate with a higher share of the budget dedicated to LMP and a higher real LMP spending per person wanting to work. At the level of individual countries, we observe changing spending profiles, but no common trend. There is some convergence of labour market policy spending in the observation period, but it is mostly a ‘con­vergence from above’ in the sense that some big spenders drastically cut their expenditure. This holds in particular for cash benefits, but also for ALMP. Some CEE countries increase their LMP spending, start­ing partly from very low initial levels. While training remains the most important spending category among the different types of ALMP, spend­ing slowly shifts away from this costly, but long-term investment in human capital. This is for us the most important sign that the discursive dominance of the social investment paradigm in Europe since the early 2000s is not reflected in the trends of LMP spending. Despite the asymmetric spending on LMP in Europe, we do not postulate further socioeconomic diver­gence between European countries as a consequence: Our multivariate analysis does not unequivocally con­firm aggregate positive effects of ALMP or PLMP on employment. A positive effect of ALMP spending on employment, if it exists, remains small according to our estimates. The econometric literature on the macro-economic effects of LMP is also divided. We used an innovative approach to evaluate the impact of LMPs on the level as well as the distribution of employment (taking on board externalities such as substitution or crowding out) by combining country-level statistics on LMP expenditure with individual data on labour market status drawn from EU-SILC. We separately estimated the effects of LMP expenses on (a) the probability of participating in the labour market (= activity rate), either employed or unemployed); and (b) the probability of employment. This yielded the following results: Contrary to the predictions of the (neoliberal) ‘making work pay’ or the (conservative) ‘dependency’ theory, more generous spending on cash benefits (PLMP) has no negative effect on the probability of employment. The alleged disincentive effect on job search may be offset by a positive ‘social investment’ effect: higher unemployment benefits allow job seekers to invest more in their human capital and in job search. Concerning the probability of economic activity, more generous benefits do have a positive effect. This can be explained by the fact that a better social protection attracts more people into the (formal) labour market. As regards the effects of ALMP, our results are more critical: higher expenditure on such measures tends to go in pair with higher employment rates (as expected) but these effects are not robust across different specifications. More intensive ALMP also goes in pair with lower activity rates, which is more surprising. The most straightforward interpretation of the latter effect would be reverse causality: governments may decide to invest more in ALMP when they consider activity rates as insufficient. However, we tried to rule out such reverse causality by taking into account a time lag of one to two years between ALMP spending and the probability of economic activity. Plausible alternative interpretations are ‘threat effects’ of ALMP and sanctions that drive persons who do not find jobs into inactivity. This suggests that ALMP do have substantial perverse effects, which raises concerns about the design and implementation of ALMP. The most positive aspect of ALMP appears to be their redistributive effect. Female, older, and low edu­cated workers benefit most from LMP: their economic activity and employment is promoted, in contrast to younger, better educated or male workers. Systematically privileging the more disadvantaged groups highlights LMP as a promotor of equality at the labour market.

This report examines effects of social protection in the EU. Part I analyses (trends in) the impact of social benefits on poverty: What differences in social protection can we observe between countries? How has social protection changed in the wake of the crisis in Europe? Our analysis emphasises some economic conditions of welfare states’ fight against poverty which are too often neglected in the public and the scien­tific discussion. We assert that poverty rates have been rising in Europe since before the ‘Great Recession’, but argue that this is not exclusively caused by welfare state change. While it is true that the evolution of social protection was negative on average across European countries, there was a number of countries (13) where the effectiveness of social benefits against poverty improved. Yet, it did not always improve suffi­ciently to counter growing primary income inequalities. We see a detrimental legacy of the ‘Great Recession’ at least as much in terms of poverty challenges as in terms of welfare state institutions in Europe. Social benefits strongly modify the income distribution and the poverty rate in some European countries, but less in others. Scandinavian social security systems generally offer the strongest social protection in Europe, though the Dutch and the Irish social security systems seem to come ahead of the Swedish most recently in terms of impact of social benefits (maybe not services in-kind). Households’ poverty gaps in Northern Europe being particularly wide, the poverty-alleviating impacts of Scandinavian social benefits appear even more impressive as soon as one controls for the poverty challenge. Richer countries generally feature greater inequality before redistribution, but the poverty-alleviating impacts of their social security systems are also higher. Countries assist the poorest households to different degrees. In all countries, households escape poverty risks through social benefits more rarely if their poverty gap is bigger. In some countries, however, the households with the lowest primary incomes are hardly ever lifted above the poverty threshold (e.g. Roma­nia, Latvia). In contrast, social benefits are a comparatively big success against poverty also for the poorest households especially in the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway and the United Kingdom. Part II zooms in on the effectiveness of social benefits in supporting the most vulnerable households (those faced with ‘pre-transfer poverty’ and those with very low work intensity) in leaving the state of pov­erty and/or quasi-joblessness. We examine the dynamic effects, i.e. shifts in socio-economic position fol­lowing one and two years after benefit receipt. A central finding is that ‘more generous’ social benefits have a negative impact on households’ leaving the state of dependency or of increasing work intensity. However, even though statistically significant, effects are extremely small: we estimate that if the amount of social benefits doubles, the poverty gap shrinks between one and two percentage points less within one year. Households that receive fewer benefits are thus a little faster in gaining financial independence from the social security system. The negative effect of social benefits is found to be stronger for households with a greater depth of poverty, respectively with lower work intensity. Higher social benefits are also connected to a slower return to employment, but the estimated effect is even smaller. A doubling of social benefits would results in a less than one percentage point lower increase in work intensity between two consecutive years. This (negative) relationship is driven by households at high risk of poverty. This suggests that only households that find their income situation significantly improved by social benefits tend to use the additional financial leeway for staying at distance from the labour market (while an alleged ‘disincentive effect’ should in principle apply to all sorts of households). An important finding is that households seek to escape the situation of benefit dependency and jobless­ness rather independently of whether social benefits are ‘generous’ or not; until they have successfully done so, benefits grant households social protection, and possibly also improve subsequent job matching. All in all, there seems to be no genuine trade-off between ‘generosity’ and efficiency of social security benefits.

We examined the relationship between the tobacco industry and the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology (RTP) using the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library and internet sources. We determined the funding relationships, and categorised the conclusions of all 52 RTP papers on tobacco or nicotine between January 2013 and June 2015, as “positive”, “negative” or “neutral” for the tobacco industry. RTP’s editor, 57% (4/7) of associate editors and 37% (14/38) of editorial board members had worked or consulted for tobacco companies. Almost all (96%, 50/52) of the papers had authors with tobacco industry ties. Seventy-six percent (38/50) of these papers drew conclusions positive for industry; none drew negative conclusions. The two papers by authors not related to the tobacco industry reached conclusions negative to the industry (p

NBER Working Paper No. 24623; We develop a method for comparing levels and trends in inequality in mortality in the United States and France between 1990 and 2010 in a similar framework. The comparison shows that while income inequality has increased in both the United States and France, inequality in mortality in France remained remarkably low and stable. In the United States, inequality in mortality increased for older groups (especially women) while it decreased for children and young adults. These patterns highlight the fact that despite the strong cross-sectional relationship between income and health, there is no necessary connection between changes in income inequality and changes in health inequality.

ISTR Voluntas Best Paper Awards for 2012 and 2013 were awarded at the ISTR Conference in Munster, 23rd July 2014. The Best Paper Award Committee’s rationale and citation of the two prize winning articles are presented here. ISTR’s journal Voluntas is a highly productive journal, which has published an increasing number of articles in recent years, and which has also become indexed in the ISI Social Citation Index. Voluntas published 49 papers in 2012 and 53 in 2013. This included one special issue on civil society in Africa, and several thematic

This report was prepared within the framework of the Europe H2020 project ‘Rebuilding an inclusive, value based Europe of solidarity and trust through social investments’ (RE-InVEST). The project RE-InVEST aims to contribute to a more solidary and trust worthy Europe, through an inclusive, powerful and effective social investment strategy at EU-level. Moreover, the project itself adopts a participative approach that lends a voice to vulnerable groups and civil society organisations. The RE-InVEST consortium consists of mem­bers of informal network ‘the Alliances to fight Poverty’, a network of civil society organisations, trade unions, policy makers and academics co-ordinated by Flemish Cristian labour movement ‘beweging.net, and committed to a more inclusive Europe. The consortium covers a broad range of European countries, both geographically (12 countries, 13 regions) and in terms of representation of different welfare and labour market traditions. In particular, this report aims to assess the role of active labour market policies (ALMPs) and social protection from a social investment perspective. The evaluation of national/regional policies has been carried out through participatory qualitative research from the perspective of the most vulnerable groups. Mixed focus groups were created in seven countries (Austria, Belgium, England, France, Latvia, Portugal and Switzerland) between September 2016 and June 2017. The analyses were carried out by the local partners, consisting of NGOs and/or researchers. The fact that the focus of the Portuguese research paper is on the young unemployed is attributable to unemployment remaining a major problem among young people aged between 18-29 years old. Despite the slight improvement of economic and social indicators in Portugal, this aspect stills requires careful attention, as new entrants to the labour market, young people face serious difficulties to get a job. This is mostly exacerbated when they do not receive any kind of social protection and particularly when they are coerced into accepting job offers. Young people in precarious employment face higher job insecurity and uncertainty about the future, which are relevant negative factors affecting their ability to make life plans and establish their goals in line with reasonable expectations about upcoming opportunities. This group has been so severely hit by the economic crisis and so it is a great concern and a top priority[1] among EU Member States. Youth Guarantee (YG) as a recent and innovative programme aims to give a response to youth unemployment. This report examines the extent to which the young unemployed (18 to 29 years) obtain a response from YG to their needs and whether these measures are articulated with social protection policies or not, in other words if they invest in social needs. The RE-InVEST consortium has jointly developed the PAHRCA – a methodology that combines prin­ciples of Participatory Action research with Human Rights and Capability Approaches. This qualitative, participatory research does not produce representative results but rather aims to deepen the understanding of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP) and Social Protection (SP) impacts on the lives of vulnerable people and give them a voice. [1] In the 2015 Annual Growth Survey, the Commission called for determined action to improve the labour market situation of young people, with the Youth Guarantee representing an ambitious way of combining different instruments to address youth unemployment effectively. Thematic fiche youth unemployment European Semester (European Commission, 2015).

This report was prepared in the framework of the Europe H2020 project ‘Rebuilding an inclusive, value based Europe of solidarity and trust through social investments’ (RE-InVEST). The project adopts a par­ticipative approach that lends a voice to vulnerable groups and civil society organisations. The theoretical framework applied in the Re-InVEST project builds on a human rights and capabilities approach. In France, the team includes IRD (academic research) and GRDR (association); we chose to work with immigrant populations from West Africa living in the Paris region (in the Ile-de-France region and particu­larly in the department of Seine Saint-Denis) in the priority areas designated by urban policies, that is to say, neighbourhoods defined according to the level of poverty. In these neighbourhoods, the share of immi­grants or descendants of non-European immigrants is high (mainly from North or West Africa). We have considered, in this part of the project, the difficulties of integration into the labour market of the young immigrants or descendants of immigrants living in these neighbourhoods, aged between 16 and 25 years. These young people, that are from poor families and living in less-favoured areas, are often exposed to chaotic school routes and to difficulties of access to employment, because of a build-up of several diffi­culties: low level of training, discrimination linked to their origins, to their living space or their gender, the low mobility, the gap in the relational codes because of the low social mix of the neighbourhoods in which they live. The crisis strengthened disparities on the labour market, including within the youth, which is not at a homogeneous category. Many devices have been set up to facilitate the insertion of young people in the labour market and these measures are regularly improved or renewed. The YEI (Youth Employment Initiative) is a search for inno­vation and diversification of actions, with the to reinforce the quality of the support offered to young people, the greatest security of the pathways of young who are defined as ‘NEET’ (Nor in education, in employ­ment, or in training) .The system is more flexible, but without financial allocation . It is linked to the need to take into account, besides difficulties in accessing the labour market, social, educational, economic, psy­chological and somatic difficulties, through a highly individualised accompaniment and a diversity of modes of action: individual interviews, theatre workshop, digital workshop, etc. The implementation of the YEI constitutes, for the GRDR, an opportunity to experiment an approach of accompaniment for the occupational integration of young NEET people from 16 to 25 years old living in Seine Saint-Denis. Our approach is comparative, comprehensive and operational, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. In this respect, participation in the Re-Invest study of the beneficiaries of the YEI scheme was sought, particularly through collective times. The aim was to make the interviewed people co-producers of the research. However, due to constraints related to the young people (mobility, etc.) and to the modalities of the inquiry (participation in the study, departure of the PhD student, ...), we then favoured the involvement of the team in charge of the technical implementation of the YEI system, that is to say the two mission managers in order to get them to analyse their accompanying practices, in relation to the situ­ations of young people. In a context of public policies promoting the principles of accountability, contractualisation (and condition­alities), the implementation of the YEI nevertheless enabled the GRDR to experiment with an approach and methods allowing the construction of paths of autonomy and professional projects. The results of the inquiry lead us to formulate the following conclusions, in form of recommendations: The imbrication of the needs of young people requires the design of support devices that take into account in an articulated manner the different variables affecting the integration pathways and the professional plans: level of training, family situations, administrative situations and socio-economic conditions, social positioning, possible psychological difficulties, self-esteem and self-confidence. Acting only on the job search process is thus largely insufficient for many young people. As such, the issue coordination and accompaniment of actors is one of the other major stakes revealed by the study. The analysis of social situations and the review of young people touched by the IE trajecto­ries, report successions of accompaniments without links between the professionals and frequent ruptures of administrative management. On the other hand, there is often a lack of consultation between the actors of the accompaniment on the procedures to be implemented and the definition of the courses. The training of professionals proves to be an already identified need, which is confirmed by the present study. It may be interesting, however, to integrate beneficiary participation in a renewed form of produc­tion of practices and accompanying knowledge.

The European project RE-InVEST re-assesses the role of active labour market and social protection policy for integrating vulnerable groups from a social investment perspective that the EU endorsed as a response to the financial crisis. This Belgian national case study of RE-InVEST used peer research to investigate the nature and effect of relevant policies concerning unemployed persons with a migratory background. This report analyses the counselling services in Flanders, where two services have the task to reintegrate unem­ployed people. The main research question is the quality of the counselling and the possible differences between the counselling services. Lessons can be learned from these analyses. The qualitative research addresses the question if the counselling comply with the social investment perspective from a human rights and capability approach. We detected that the counselling has negative consequences for the clients, espe­cially for people with a migratory background. It increases fatalism among people with a migratory back­ground. Those people tend to lose every hope for an opportunity to develop their talents or any hope for a life they have reason to value. The unilateral focus on the demand side and a lack of insight in the supply side has negative consequences on participation, agency and choice. Though activation is a goal, counselling is not guided by social investment in general.

This report was prepared in the framework of the Europe H2020 project ‘Rebuilding an inclusive, value based Europe of solidarity and trust through social investments’ (RE-InVEST). The project adopts a participative approach that lends a voice to vulnerable groups and civil society organisations. The theoretical framework applied in the RE-InVEST project builds on a human rights and capabilities approach. The evaluation of national/regional policies were carried out through participatory qualitative research from the perspective of the most vulnerable groups. Mixed focus groups were implemented this research in 8 countries (EN, IE, PT, CH, LV, BE, FR, AT). The analyses were carried out by the local partners, who consist of NGOs and/or research institutions. The focus of the research on the disabled unemployed has been chosen because employment is becoming an increasingly more significant problem among persons with disabilities. In recent years Latvia has devoted increasing attention to ALMPs, which range from career counselling and job placement services to training programmes and hiring subsidies. In December 2015 the Government approved the Implementation plan from 2015-2017 of the Guidelines on the Implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2014-2020. The Implementation Plan includes measures to promote people with disabilities’ integration into the labour market and their acquisition, development and improvement of work skills. This report examines in what extend disabled unemployed have benefited from ALMP measures, how these measures meet their needs accordingly assessing the role of social protection and active labour market policies (ALMPs) from a social investment perspective. Particular attention was paid to the difficulties of integration into the labor market of the people with disabilities. The disabled unemployed recommendations for improvement ALMP measures are the following: It is necessary to provide training for specialists of the SEA who work with disabled unemployed persons. One of the most significant problems that needs to be addressed to improve ALMP measures for people with disabilities is the implementation of a more personalised approach. The range of services should be developed and appropriate for the various types and severity of disability. It is necessary to expand the range of activities offered by the SEA to people with disabilities. In addition, it should be taken into account the regional specifics, labour market demand in the regions. The disabled unemployed need more support and encouragement from the staff of the SEA which also means that it is necessary to educate specialists of the SEA for work with the disabled unemployed taking into consideration their specific needs and options to ensure respect for their human rights and their freedom to make their own choices. Accessibility of the environment and the transport issues should be addressed. Much more attention should be paid to the quality of the offered jobs for the unemployed people with disabilities, they cannot be in their majority only low-paid jobs requiring low or no qualifications at all. The RE-InVEST consortium has jointly developed the PAHRCA – a methodology that combines principles of Participatory Action research with Human Rights and Capability Approaches. This qualitative, participatory research does not produce representative results but rather aims to deepen the understanding of Active Labour Marketing Policies (ALMP) and Social Protection (SP) impacts on the lives of vulnerable people and give them a voice.

This policy paper summarizes four corridor studies on bilateral social security agreements (BSSAs) between four European Union (EU) member and two non-member states, draws conclusions on their results, and offers recommendations. BSSAs between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries are seen as the most important instrument to establish portability of social security benefits for internationally mobile workers. Yet, only about 23 percent of international migrants profit from BSSAs and their functioning has been little analyzed and even less assessed. The four corridors studied (Austria-Turkey, Germany-Turkey, Belgium-Morocco, and France-Morocco) were selected to allow for comparison of both similarities and differences in experiences. The evaluation of these corridors’ BSSAs was undertaken against a methodological framework and three selected criteria: fairness for individuals, fiscal fairness for countries, and bureaucratic effectiveness for countries and migrant workers. The results suggest that the investigated BSSAs work and overall deliver reasonably well on individual fairness. The results on fiscal fairness are clouded by conceptual and empirical gaps. Bureaucratic effectiveness would profit from information and communication technology-based exchanges on both corridors once available.

Background A number of studies reveal a strong linkage between SC use and avoiding positiveurine creens. Despite this work and given the high rates of criminal justice supervision among Black men in the U.S., little is known about SC usage among Black men under criminal justice supervision. Methods In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 11 Black men under criminal justicesupervision treated by an urban ED for violent injury. Results Themes that emerged from the analysis include 1) prevalence of use, 2)health literacy, 3) availability and costs, 4) negative side effects, and 5) criminal justice supervision. Conclusions Criminal justice supervision policies are a contributing factor to SC use among Black men under criminal justice supervision.