Suchergebnisse

Derren Hayes meets Joanne Hay, chief executive of Teens and Toddlers

With public sector funding reducing, children's charities could increasingly turn to social investment to achieve their goals

Ten years after the first economic crisis of twenty-first century capitalism, Europe seems to have passed the nadir of the Great Recession. Time to count our blessings: a rerun of the Great Depression has been avoided and recovery, albeit timid, is under way, while unemployment and poverty are coming down. The jury is still out on whether economic and job growth will return to pre-crisis levels. Unemployment remains high in the European Union (EU), especially in the economies heavily scarred by the European debt crisis, such as Greece and Spain. The political aftershocks of the Great Recession — ranging from a rather hard Brexit, the rise of populism in Western Europe, the spread of illiberal nationalism in Eastern Europe, and escalating trade tensions between China and the United States (US) — forecast the deceleration of the world economy, and the challenges of a costly transformation into a greener world economy now confront the European Union project, anchored on a premise of peace, prosperity and democracy, underpinned by an existential predicament.

"This book focuses on the main institutional changes affecting the Social Investment approach, as the framework for the European social agenda. The contributions gathered address these issues from different angles, placing two fundamental issues at the centre of the analysis. The first concerns the promotion of the strategic actions of European institutions and the national governments aimed at making social investment a recovery priority in the Eurozone. The second aims to make the social investment approach compatible not only with a high road to growth, as it is in the Stock-Flow-Buffer scheme, but also with the right to balance market and non-market activities as a universal right linked to a different combination of working and living time. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of social policy and European politics"--

"This book focuses on the main institutional changes affecting the Social Investment approach, as the framework for the European social agenda. The contributions gathered address these issues from different angles, placing two fundamental issues at the centre of the analysis. The first concerns the promotion of the strategic actions of European institutions and the national governments aimed at making social investment a recovery priority in the Eurozone. The second aims to make the social investment approach compatible not only with a high road to growth, as it is in the Stock-Flow-Buffer scheme, but also with the right to balance market and non-market activities as a universal right linked to a different combination of working and living time. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of social policy and European politics"--

This article offers an overview of scholarship on social investment policies in relation to the integration of immigrants and the role they can play in multicultural societies. At first sight, social investment is a promising strategy to deal with the inequalities in human capital and life chances that plague multicultural societies. However, on the basis of the available knowledge, the article shows that the benefit of social investment interventions for immigrants may be lower than expected for two main reasons. First, there are access biases in most typical social investment policies (for example, childcare, active labour market policies, training) that tend to limit participation by non-natives. Second, employers' recruitment preferences and labour market discrimination are also likely to limit the potential of social investment interventions for immigrants. I conclude that to exploit the full potential of social investment policies in the promotion of immigrant integration, these policies need to be adapted, particularly by taking into account the essential role played by employers.

The notion of prioritising 'productive' social investments over 'consumptive' social spending has long been advocated but only sporadically applied. Since 2011, however, New Zealand governments have implemented an ambitious, multi-agency social investment agenda that promises to overhaul public social spending through analyses of citizen-derived data. This commentary focuses on the development and features of the social investment agenda. In doing so, it discusses the apparent primacy of fiscal outcomes over social outcomes, and the practices and politics of data-driven governance.