March 2019

Staying Put: Adapting the Places Instead of the People

By Susan Lanspery &‎ Joan Hyde Most existing housing offers a poor fit for older people and people with disabilities, and new construction adds less than 2 per cent to the housing each year. Ninety-nine percent of the housing that will be in use in the year 2000 exists today. The long-needed anthology "Staying Put: Adapting the Places Instead of the People" emphasizes the disabilities and abilities of environments instead of individuals. With contributions from leading authorities, it integrates a...

Understanding the Spatial Disparities and Vulnerability of Population Aging in China

By Yang Cheng (Beijing Normal University (BNU)), Siyao Gao (Beijing Normal University (BNU)), Shuai Li (Beijing Normal University (BNU)), Yuchao Zhang (Independent), Mark Rosenberg (Queen's University) Understanding the regional pattern of population aging in China enables rational policy making to address the challenges of inequity in social welfare and care resources among the east–central–west regions and rural–urban areas of China. This study uses census data in 2000 and 2010, and aging population ratios, annual increase rates, and spatial auto-correlation analysis...

February 2019

Household Savings in Central Eastern and Southeastern Europe: How Do Poorer Households Save?

By Elisabeth Beckmann (Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB)) Based on a survey of households in 10 Central Eastern European and Western Balkan countries, this paper presents new and unique evidence on which households have savings and how they save. The paper shows that the percentage of savers is low, and savings are frequently informal. Formal savings are dominated by bank savings, and participation in contractual and capital market savings is very low in comparison to high-income countries. Poor households are significantly less...

The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty

By Clayton M. Christensen,‎ Efosa Ojomo,‎ Karen Dillon Clayton M. Christensen, the author of such business classics as The Innovator’s Dilemma and the New York Times bestseller How Will You Measure Your Life, and co-authors Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon reveal why so many investments in economic development fail to generate sustainable prosperity, and offers a groundbreaking solution for true and lasting change.Global poverty is one of the world’s most vexing problems. For decades, we’ve assumed smart, well-intentioned people will eventually be able to change the...

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy

By Alexandrea J. Ravenelle Choose your hours, choose your work, be your own boss, control your own income. Welcome to the sharing economy, a nebulous collection of online platforms and apps that promise to transcend capitalism. Supporters argue that the gig economy will reverse economic inequality, enhance worker rights, and bring entrepreneurship to the masses. But does it?In Hustle and Gig, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle shares the personal stories of nearly eighty predominantly millennial workers from Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, and Kitchensurfing. Their...

Globalisation,Human Security and Social Inclusion

By Olivia Joseph Aluko The groundwork for this volume was laid during a presentation I gave titled ‘Migration as a security threat’ at the 4th Diaspora International Conference organised by the World Association of Sustainable development (WASD) in the UK. Thus, this work is a contribution to a large body of literature on migration studies throughout the whole world. The process of writing this book has come at a time when a spotlight has been placed on immigration as a growing...

Pensions at Work: Socially Responsible Investment of Union-Based Pension Funds

By Jack Quarter,‎ Isla Carmichael,‎ Sherida Ryan Pension funds have come to play an increasingly important role within the new economy. According to Statistics Canada, in 2006, trusteed pension funds in Canada had $836 billion of assets and represented the savings of 4.6 million Canadian workers. Pensions at Work is a unique collection of papers that uses a labour perspective to deal with the socially responsible investment of pension funds. Featuring leading Canadian and international scholars, it builds on existing scholarship on...

State Automatic Enrollment IRAs After the Trump Election: Are They Preempted by ERISA?

By Kathryn L. Moore (University of Kentucky College of Law) In recent years, a number of states have sought to close the retirement savings funding gap by enacting legislation mandating that employers that do not sponsor a voluntary pension plan for their employees automatically enroll their employees in a state-administered IRA program. This article focuses on the most serious legal challenge these programs face: ERISA preemption.  The article begins by providing an overview of the state automatic enrollment IRA programs....

Perspectives on Poverty in Europe

By Stephen P. Jenkins (London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - Department of Social Policy and Administration; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); University of Essex - Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER)) I address four topics: how our capacities to monitor poverty in Europe have improved substantially over recent decades; how progress on EU poverty reduction has been disappointing and why this has been; conceptual and measurement issues; and the future direction of EU-level anti-poverty...

The Economic Effects of the UK Government’s Proposed Brexit Deal

By Arno Hantzsche (National Institute of Economic and Social Research; University of Nottingham), Amit Kara (Bank of England - Monetary Policy Committee), Garry Young (National Institute of Economic and Social Research) The focus of our analysis is on how the UK government's proposed Brexit deal is likely to affect the economy. First, we assess how trade, migration, foreign direct investment, productivity and contributions to the EU budget might change by reviewing current proposals against historical evidence. Second, we use the...