世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

세계화가 과연 하나의 독립변수로 사용하기에 충분할 정도로 그 의미가 명확하게 규명된 과학적 개념인가의 여부는 학계의 지속적인 의문으로 남아 있다. 특히 최근에는 현저하게 드러나고 있는 각종 반세계화 현상을 바탕으로 세계화에 대한 반론이 거세지고 있으며 일부 세계화론 주창자들조차 ‘현실’로서 세계화 현상에 대한 회의적 시각을 표출하고 있어 그 의문은 더욱 커지고 있다. 이에 따라 세계화를 설명 변수로 삼는 모든 연구 영역에서 세계화의 의미와 세계화와 관련된 연구 성과를 반추해 볼 필요성도 커지고 있다. 본 연구의 목적은 세계화의 의미 분석을 바탕으로 세계화를 안보환경 변화의 독립변수로 삼는 연구의 동향을 분석하고 연구의 방향을 제시하는데 있다. 세계화는 그 설명적 가치와 규범적 판단을 둘러싸고 논란이 계속되고 있는 개념이다. 세계화는 세계화론자를 중심으로 발전되어 온 개념이지만 이들 사이에서도 개념에 대한 합의는 존재하지 않는다. 세계화는 가장 단순하게는 하나의 현상 혹은 사건으로 간주되기도 하지만, 세계화의 본질을 규명하려는 입장에서는 세계화의 원인과 영향에 대한 인과관계는 물론 사회관계 본질이나 권력관계 변화를 적시하는 개념으로 취급하여 왔다. 그러나 세계화를 개념화하려는 노력은 수많은 하부 현상을 단일 요소로 설명해야 하며, 역으로 개념 속에 혼재되어 있는 세계화의 원인, 결과, 설명 및 규범적 판단 요소를 단순화해야 한다는 과제를 안고 있다. 특히 원인과 결과가 혼재되어 있는 세계화 개념은 현상 분석을 위한 설명체제 구성에 가장 큰 장애요인이 되고 있다. 세계화와 안보와의 관계를 다루는 연구는 대체로 세계화에 관한 중도론적 입장에서 안보에 관한 낙관론을 피하고 새로운 위협을 제시하는데 초점을 맞추는데, 이러한 경향은 안보연구에서 세계화를 가장 단순한 수준에서 정의하는 데에서 비롯된다. 그러나 지나치게 단순한 세계화 개념을 적용하는 안보연구는 질적으로 새로운 현상인 세계화를 여전히 국가중심적 시각에서 다루고 모든 안보위협을 테러리즘의 문제로 축소하려는 환원주의의 문제를 야기한다. 이러한 문제를 극복하기 위해서는 세계화 개념의 불완전성을 염두에 둔 세계화 개념에 대한 접근과 일관된 세계화 개념 적용이 요구된다. 또한 세계화 현상으로부터 직접적인 안보 사안을 도출하는 노력에서 한 차원 더 나아가 안보연구의 새로운 방향을 제시해 줄 수 있는 안보환경 변화의 전체적 특성을 분석하는 포괄적 연구가 요구된다.

세계화(globalization)와 안보 연구

Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment. Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 2003. 392 pp. ISBN 0-87154-356-7. $39.95 (cloth). This book begins with the phrase "imagine a world," which aptly describes the authors' aim. The "world" that Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers imagine is a "dual-earner-dual-carer" U.S. society, a "fully gender-egalitarian, economically secure, caring society" (p. 4). They acknowledge the enormous magnitude of transformation that would be required for such an end vision to be achieved, but point out that without a clear end vision, such a transformation would be impossible. Gornick and Meyers propose that a dual-earner-dual-carer society can be achieved through three key changes: 1) Shifting several hours per week of men's time from paid work to care for children, and a smaller number of women's hours from home to paid work 2) Creating new employment arrangements to allow men and women to take time for parenting without excessive financial or advancement penalties in the workplace 3) Reducing standard working hours and expanding paid family leave and public funding for child care Although not given a great deal of space in the book, I was intrigued by Gornick and Meyers's analysis of tension among three discourses about work and family. Advocates for children tend to favor policies such as child tax credits and maternity leaves that make it easier for mothers to stay at home with young children, temporarily opting out of the labor market. Discourse about work-family conflict tends to favor policies that make it easier for women to be workers and parents simultaneously, such as part-time work, job sharing, and flexible schedules. Feminists emphasize the pursuit of gender equality by improving access to high-quality nonparental care for children and access to high-quality jobs for women. The problem with each of these solutions, according to Gornick and Meyers, is that they pit gender equality against the interests of children, in each case sacrificing one interest in favor of the other, and in all cases sidestepping the need for change in men's behavior. The dual-earner-dual-carer vision is an effort to simultaneously pursue both goals by transforming both men's and women's roles. Much of the book is devoted to articulating shortcomings in U.S. policies relative to other industrialized nations in North America or Europe. While the theme is familiar, the book includes an expansive, data-driven, and clear articulation of the evidence, drawing on national data sets and the content of specific regulations in several countries. For example, the U.S. spends $650 per child and 0.5% of its GDP on children, less than half the amounts allocated by countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe. Policy data are juxtaposed with an embarrassing litany of poor outcomes for children in the United States relative to their peers in other countries: high rates of low birth weight and mortality among infants, low achievement scores in science and math and high levels of television watching among school children, and high rates of teen pregnancy. …

Families that work: Policies for reconciling parenthood and employment

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/spol.12617

Varieties of liberalism: A comparative analysis of family policy and poverty outcomes across the 50 United States

Poverty rates among single parents vary considerably across countries, in part reflecting differences in the generosity and design of minimum income protections. We ask what the optimal ways are to target income support to single parents, if the prime objective of policy is to shelter those households from poverty. We map minimum income provisions for working and nonworking single-parent households across Europe and the United States, showing that three things matter for adequate minimum income protection. First, minimum wage levels matter, obviously for working single parents, but also for jobless ones since they effectively set the ‘glass ceiling’ for out-of-work benefits. Second, the overall generosity of the child benefit package is crucial to shelter both working and jobless single parents from poverty. Third, countries that employ a strategy of “targeting within universalism” (that is directing extra support to vulnerable groups such as single parents within the context of a universal benefit program) tend to do best.

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Income Support Policies for Single Parents in Europe and the United States: What Works Best?

This article investigates whether economic forces that have led to increasing wage inequalities also place structural constraints on the ability of welfare states to protect the most vulnerable in society. Throughout the past two decades, the capacity of minimum income packages to lift low-income households above the poverty line has stagnated or decreased across much of the European Union and the United States. In evaluating the determinants behind these trends, this paper introduces a framework to conceptualize the tensions facing modern welfare states in their attempt to (1) provide poverty-alleviating minimum income protections, (2) achieve employment growth, and (3) keep spending levels in check. We argue that, due to downward pressure on low-skilled labor, it has become more difficult to balance each of those three objectives; accordingly, we observe that the stagnation of low gross wages contributes to a ‘structural inadequacy’ around minimum income protections for the jobless. Albeit with large differences in both levels and trends, these structural constraints span across all welfare state ‘regimes’. Our findings have direct implications for future policy changes to minimum income protections, as well as growing public and academic interest in the potential of a universal basic income.

Rising Inequalities and Welfare Generosity: Structural Constraints on the Adequacy of Minimum Incomes in European and American Welfare States

The emergence of the platform economy has served as a defining feature of increasing fragmented labour markets in modern economies. Recent research on platform work, however, has struggled to quantify the socio-economic conditions of platform workers relative to other occupation groups. Moreover, it remains unclear if the socio-economic disadvantages that platform workers are likely to face are primarily channeled through lower incomes or their more precarious working conditions. This study uses representative survey data of platform workers in Italy to investigate their size, composition, and socio- economic conditions relative to individuals in other occupations. Our findings reveal that platform workers tend to be students and of younger age, but are diverse with respect to sex, educational attainment, and native-born status. We find that platform workers face greater economic insecurity relative to all other occupation classes. Strikingly, they also feature a rate of economic insecurity that is not significantly different from that of unemployed adults. Moreover, we find that the higher levels of insecurity are not primarily channeled through lower incomes; instead, higher rates of insecurity persist even when taking family incomes into account, suggesting that the precarity and volatility of platform work matter as much as income differences in shaping economic disadvantage. Results hold under analyses that account for selection into platform work. Our findings carry important consequences for understandings of the intensity and sources of socio- economic disadvantage of individuals engaged in platform work.

Platform Work and Economic Insecurity: Evidence from Italian Survey Data

Cash assistance allocations from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and its predecessor program fell from $34.3 billion to $7.4 billion in real value from 1993 to 2016, a 78% decrease. Some investigations of TANF point to favorable labor market changes as the source of the decline, whereas others point to declining benefit levels and barriers to benefit receipt. This study introduces a framework to decompose the decline of TANF cash assistance into changes in need for cash assistance, the participation rate among those meeting income-based eligibility standards, and benefit levels among those receiving cash support. Using the U.S. Current Population Survey, I find that declining participation explains 52% of the decline in TANF cash assistance from 1993 onward, whereas declining need explains 21%, and declining benefit levels explain 27%. The study then applies reweighting techniques to measure the extent to which compositional changes in the population, such as rising employment rates among single mothers, can explain changes in need, participation, and benefit levels. The results suggest that compositional changes explain only 22% of the decline of TANF cash assistance, confirming that the majority of the decline is due to reduced participation and benefit levels rather than reduced demand for cash support. Adding the noncompositional share of the decline in TANF back to observed levels of cash spending in 2016 would result in nearly $20 billion in additional transfers, more than the minimum amount necessary to lift all single-mother households out of poverty.

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Zachary Parolin

Papers

Varieties of liberalism: A comparative analysis of family policy and poverty outcomes across the 50 United States

Income Support Policies for Single Parents in Europe and the United States: What Works Best?

Rising Inequalities and Welfare Generosity: Structural Constraints on the Adequacy of Minimum Incomes in European and American Welfare States

Platform Work and Economic Insecurity: Evidence from Italian Survey Data

Decomposing the Decline of Cash Assistance in the United States, 1993 to 2016.