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In Auton v. British Columbia, our courts faced a perfect storm created by colliding social, political, and legal forces. The end result of the litigation in Canada was a case described by the Supreme Court as "the first case of this type to reach this court." in the view of the Supreme Court, the unanimous findings in the lower court had been built upon an incorrect premise that the provincial medicare scheme conferred a statutory right to public funding for all medically necessary services. The Court concluded that outside these core medical services, the statute had granted administrative discretion as to whether to extend public funding for treatments, such as intensive behavioural the rapy or other professional disciplines, such as behavioural the rapy. The Court went on to consider whether the petitioners were wrongly excluded from funding under the statute as properly construed. The perfect storm underlying Auton raises the more general question of the intersection of equality rights and the development and administration of social programs. In this paper, Geoffrey Cowper addresses some of the criticisms made of the result and reasoning in Auton. He the n addresses briefly the results and reasoning in other social benefit cases. That analysis suggests that the Court does not have a fixed approach to equality claims which arise in the context of social benefit programs. Rather, as in Auton, the Court appears consistently to prefer a more narrowly legal means of resolving the disputes rather than employing general questions of social policy and considering how equality analysis may facilitate or interfere with identified social objectives. To the extent that the decided cases indicate a trend, the Court appears to have little hesitation when it is convinced that the use of the distinction in its context is arbitrary and unfair.

Since officers who conduct hearings in benefit procedures are given so much latitude and are so free from any leading-strings of a court process, it is of the essence not only that they possess a judicial attitude of mind but that they be keenly alive to the social implications of their work. In 1929, the New York Industrial Survey Commission wrote: "Referees are in every essential judicial officers; and they should be, so far as is humanly possible, above suspicion of improper practices, political or otherwise. They should be persons of mature judgment and be skilled in law—not alone the Compensation law—for they touch many and various points of law not comprehended within the language of the Compensation law. They should be trained in the value of evidence, and they should know the rules of evidence even though they are not obliged to apply them in compensation hearings."It is safe to speculate that if the above had been written in 1941, it would have contained more emphasis on the social viewpoint needed by referees. They must realize that on them depends to a large extent the difficulties accompanying denial of benefits which not only may cause serious hardship to individuals but may even have repercussions of the utmost importance in the community at large. Thus referees conducting hearings are supposed to have a kind of partisanship toward the law, in that they must constantly remember that its aim is to secure payments to all qualified claimants, not merely to decide the merits of a dispute between two opposing parties. Nevertheless, an attitude which is supposed to resolve doubts in favor of a claimant as required by the compensation law does not negate a judicial frame of mind in deciding the merits of a disputed claim.

It is a truism that the response of government to the manifold necessities of modern society has made the state today an organization providing services for the community. In particular, government is regarded as an agency to help alleviate economic disparity and maladjustment. This present development does not mean that the functions of regulation and protection, the traditional concomitants of the police state of the nineteenth century, have ceased to be important. On the contrary, they have increased in magnitude and importance as means of communication and as technical knowledge have increased. Thus the regulation and licensing of the practice of medicine, for example, assume greater importance as medical knowledge increases and as the health problems of the community grow. But the new emphasis of government is indeed on assistance and service to those in need of aid, such as the unemployed, the aged, and the blind.The new functions of government are in some ways only developments of the old, and the line between regulatory and service developments is not a division between absolutely watertight compartments. In general, a regulatory function is one in which government either directs by regulations of one sort or another the way in which private individuals shall conduct themselves, or else licenses them to carry on certain activities, as found in statutes forbidding industrial homework in certain industries and requiring licenses in others.

AbstractA critical issue for many governments is boosting the adoption rates of products or technologies that enhance consumer surplus or total social welfare. Governments may, for example, pay subsidies to producers or to consumers to stimulate the manufacture or consumption of specific products, for example, energy‐efficient appliances or more effective drugs. This research proposes a strategic government investment policy, namely, share acquisition, and demonstrates its effectiveness in reaching societal objectives. We consider a Cournot quantities‐choice market comprised of homogeneous firms where the government intervenes to buy shares, and turning private firms into state‐owned enterprises. We recognize that purchasing a single private firm is the optimal policy for the government to reach its societal objectives. Additionally, taking into consideration financial constraints, we find that the optimal stake increases with the budget. Compared with the optimal output‐based subsidy policy, when the budget is low, the optimal government investment policy induces a higher consumer surplus. In addition, in differentiated Cournot competition, under which firms compete in selling substitutable products, we find that when the budget is sufficient, the optimal stake purchased first decreases and then increases according to the substitutability level among products.

Der vorliegende Bericht untersucht in Rußland die Auswirkungen der wirtschaftlichen Reformen auf die durch den Arbeitgeber bereitgestellten Sozialleistungen. Es wird beobachtet, daß in letzter Zeit die Summe der ausgezahlten Sozialleistungen durch den Arbeitgeber zurückgehen. Dies hat Auswirkungen auf das russische Sozialsystem, auf die Empfänger der Sozialleistungen, auf den Umstrukturierungsprozess von Betrieben sowie auf die finanzielle Situation der einzelnen Regionen. Die Umbruch der sozialen Infrastruktur ist somit ebenfalls ein wichtiges Thema im Zusammenhang mit der Transformation aller anderen Wirtschaftsbereiche. Um in Zukunft die Zahlung von Sozialleistungen zu garantieren, müssen sich Arbeitgeber, Gewerkschaften und Regierungsvertreter über die Ziele der künftigen

Based partly on conference paper. Why public social benefits in the U.S. took the shape they did in the Social Security Act and its aftermath.

The paper examines the attitudes of different socio-economic groups toward means- testing. By using data from an opinion survey of 1,117 Finns, the study seeks to answer the following questions: Are universal social benefits more popular than selective ones? Who are the most vigorous opponents of means-testing, the middle classes or blue-collar workers? Results give some support to the hypothesis that selective benefits are the most unpopular. The study also shows that opinions on selectivity do not cluster in one dimension, but that there are several aspects of selectivity and that the attitudes of socio- economic groups vary depending on which aspect of selectivity is at stake. The working class and Social Democrats have more reservations toward selectivity which targets the needy, whereas they are more eager to introduce selectivity into universal welfare programs by discriminating against high-income earners. Salaried employees and voters of the Conservative Party are more reluctant to exclude well-to-do people from universal benefits, whereas they accept tighter means-testing in currently means- or income-tested schemes.

This article begins with a discussion of the relations among family poverty, poor health and employment. It argues that some lone mothers are unable to keep their children out of poverty because poor health interferes with finding or maintaining employment. These issues are discussed with reference to the international literature, and also in the light of the results of a New Zealand research project that examines the self-reported health status of lone mothers on social benefits, their experiences as beneficiaries, and their views about the government requirement to seek paid work. These lone mothers were not exempted from the work test for health or disability reasons, but the questionnaire results indicate that their self-reported health status is well below that of New Zealand women of comparable age. About one-third report health problems, either their children's or their own. Excerpts from 120 qualitative interviews illustrate the challenges that many one-parent families face when they attempt to exit from welfare.

Der Social Security Act (Sozialversicherungsgesetz) vom 14.8.1935 bestimmt noch heute die Sozialausgaben der USA . Mit Ausnahme der Krankenversicherung, sind hierin Arbeitslose, alte Leute und öffentliche Hilfeleistungen angesprochen. Die Sozialversorgung wurde nie bundeseinheitlich gehandhabt und schlug sich in verschiedenen, von anderen staatlichen Wohlfahrtsleistungen für die Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft streng abgegrenzten Programmen nieder. Die Entwicklung der staatlichen Sozialversorgung vor 1935 bis heute wird anhand der unterschiedlichen Einflüsse ausgewiesen ( Wisconsin-Schule, Ohio Kommission, New Deal u.a.). (SWP-Tth)

The present regulation of carcinogens is quite slow; hundreds of substances that have tested positive for carcinogenicity in animal bioassays have not been addressed by the U.S. regulatory system. This carries with it unappreciated social, economic, and public health costs. However, there are readily available expedited approximation procedures for assessing the potency of carcinogens whose use has substantial benefits that outweigh any costs from less science‐intensive and less extensively documented assessments. These benefits can be seen by using a model to suggest the magnitude of social costs in regulating carcinogens by current conventional methods compared with expedited procedures for assessing the potency of known carcinogens. Two scenarios, one in accordance with current agency presumptions and one which assumes extreme unreliability in animal data and in the accuracy of potency assessments, compare conventional science‐intensive and expedited procedures. On both, the total social costs of expedited procedures are lower than conventional procedures across a wide range of values assigned for individual mistakes of under regulation and over regulation. It appears better to evaluate a larger universe of known carcinogens somewhat less intensively for each substance than to evaluate a small proportion of that same universe very carefully and delay considering the rest.