Jour Fixe of the ZeS

Lectures in the winter semester of 2014/15.

22.10.2014Lecture

Social Assistance in Developing Countries

Prof. Armando Barrientos (University of Manchester)
Place:
Zentrum für Sozialpolitik, Unicom
Room: 3380
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Time:
16:00 - 17:30
Lecture Series:
Jour Fixe
Semester:
WiSe 2014/15

Since the turn of the century, antipoverty transfers have emerged as a key area of international development policy and practice. Large scale programmes providing direct transfers to households in poverty in middle income countries have made an important contribution to the reduction of global poverty. More recently, antipoverty transfer programmes are beginning to emerge in low income countries. By 2010, conservative estimates indicate thatbetween three quarters and one billion people in the South lived in households receiving antipoverty transfers. The expansion of antipoverty transfers in the South largely represents domestic policy responses to poverty and vulnerability. It points to the primary role of distinctive social assistance institutions in the emerging welfare regimes in the South. In countries like South Africa or Brazil, antipoverty transfers are part of a renewed social contract focused on social, economic, and political inclusion of disadvantaged groups. The paper adopts a global perspective on the growth of social assistance in developing countries, it combines a discussion of the foundations of antipoverty transfers with an assessment of current practice.

Place:
Zentrum für Sozialpolitik, Unicom
Room: 3380
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Time:
16:15 - 17:45
Lecture Series:
Jour Fixe
Semester:
WiSe 2014/15

Place:
Zentrum für Sozialpolitik, Unicom
Room: 3380
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Time:
16:15 - 17:45
Lecture Series:
Jour Fixe
Semester:
WiSe 2014/15

Religious welfare provision has expanded drastically in Europe in the past two decades. Today its welfare organization makes the Catholic Church the largest private employer in Germany. During the neo-liberal decades of the 1990s and 2000s faith based welfare providers were heralded by many European politicians as the perfect way to cut state welfare without decreasing welfare provision or quality. Blair, Schüssel, Prodi and their likes overlooked thereby that the expansion of faith based welfare services creates a number of problems. The dismissal of homosexual employees by Catholic welfare providers in Germany is only one manifestation of distortions that faith based welfare brings in a secular environment. Harder hits that the ascendance of the modern European state resulted from the ability of nations state builders like Bismarck and Cavour to strip religious providers of their century old prerogatives in welfare provision. The handling back of welfare to religious providers today can be interpreted as the reversal of this process. At the end could stand the demise of the modern state.

Place:
Zentrum für Sozialpolitik, Unicom
Room: 3380
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Time:
16:15 - 17:45
Lecture Series:
Jour Fixe
Semester:
WiSe 2014/15

17.12.2014Lecture

The Middle Income Trap: More Politics than Economics?

Prof. Ben Ross Schneider (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT))
Place:
Zentrum für Sozialpolitik, Unicom
Room: 3380
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Time:
16:15 - 17:45
Lecture Series:
Jour Fixe
Semester:
WiSe 2014/15

Since the late 2000s, economists have reached a consensus on the existence of a middle income trap but have yet to theorize the politics of the trap. Key characteristics central to the problems of middle income countries (especially larger countries of Southeast Asia and Latin America) include low human capital, low investment in innovation, high inequality, and high informality. Solutions to these problems require substantial institutional capacity (as do social welfare programs), but at just the time when political demands for, and ability to supply, these institutions are weak. Politics in particular are stalled by fractured social groups (especially business and labor) and states with little fiscal and bureaucratic capacity, conditions that resulted in large measure from previous trajectories of growth.