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Within the context of reigniting post crisis macroeconomic growth, income inequality has emerged as a topic of significant interest for both academics and policymakers (Bastagli, Coady, and Gupta, 2012) This study builds on past literature on fiscal decentralization suggesting that redistribution is most effectively carried out at sub-central levels of government. Using the IMF's multi-sector Government Finance Statistics Yearbook database, this paper tests the impact of decentralized redistribution on income inequality for a globally representative sample of countries since 1980. The findings

In the mid‐1990s China introduced a means‐test cash benefit called the Minimum Living Standard Guarantee System (dibao). Alongside the increases in both the number of beneficiaries and the budget, there is growing public concern that dibao is creating welfare dependency. Using survey data collected in three cities in China, we investigated to what extent dibao beneficiaries look for work. Focus group discussions were held with programme administrators and beneficiaries. While headline figures suggest that a considerable proportion of beneficiaries are of working‐age and able to work, their personal and household circumstances are important factors in determining their long‐term unemployment. There are also dibao design issues that have created financial disincentives to work. The specific origins of the policy of addressing the problem created by layoffs of inefficient state‐owned enterprises are still affecting the implementation of the programme and preventing it from playing a significant role in poverty reduction.

This article briefly reviews the development of area measures of deprivation. It examines the construction of indices of deprivation and the uses to which such indices are put, particularly in respect of resource allocation. Previous attempts to develop indices have been based on a priori definitions of deprivation (eg the Department of the Environment's z score and its successor, the 1991 Deprivation Index) and have lacked an empirical base. The inherent difficulties in validation of such indices are briefly rehearsed and the article presents work in progress on an index which predicts dependency on income support. The index is based on weighted Census of Population variables and is constructed using multiple regression techniques. We present the findings and two validation procedures.

The welfare state has fostered a large volume of academic investigation but the core of its scholarship has been on the relationship between class forces and different systems of welfare. The possibility of a gender effect does not appear to have seriously troubled the minds of mainstream scholars in this domain. As a result, gender as a structuring principle of welfare systems remains under-explored. This paper undertakes a gender-focused analysis of a key aspect of welfare provision - income maintenance policies. The British welfare state is a useful site of analysis - at one stage an exemplary model of welfare provision, now a `laggard' among its European neighbours. To identify the gender dimension of British income maintenance policies, we go back as far as the 1830s for the new Poor Law. From then we trace female and male access to welfare income, in the process considering how women and men have been constructed by public income-support policies.

Instead of Albright's "3Ds," it should embrace the "3Cs"—cooperation, capabilities, and consolidation—to build a stronger European pillar in NATO