Policy, Welfare and Financial Resources. The Impact of Crisis on Territories

The book contains contributions produced as part of the research project “Welfare Policies and Financial Resources: The Impact of the Crisis on Territories” (POWER), funded by the University of Pisa (2016). The overall objective is to study the effects of the economic crisis on local welfare systems, with a special focus on decentralization and policies for which local governments are in charge. In times of increasing economic difficulties and with the gradual reduction of public funding, welfare systems are subject to continuous changes, with effects on the quality of services offered to citizens. The issue of the impact of welfare policies and their evolution in times of crisis is extremely interesting and relevant. The territory of residence is a key variable to assess the impact of such changes on beneficiaries; furthermore, attention to the local dimension meets a real demand by local governments. This process involves almost all European countries, so that we look both at the Italian system and at how other countries deal with ongoing changes. The research activity has a marked interdisciplinary connotation, which represents a novelty with respect to other literature on these topics, oftenaddressed within specific disciplines. The interdisciplinary approach allows us to have an overall picture, without neglecting the level of detail with a strong quantitative characterization and specific attention to available databases (administrative sources and survey data). The contributions collected in this book show a dual focus on both the supply and demand of social protection and suggest the opportunity of further investigating the existence of a gap between welfare interventions and priorities of citizens. Part I analyses legal issues. It aims at investigating whether and how the territorial organization and the distribution of public power on the territories affect the supply of social security, and how the financial crisis affects the allocation of the competences and the management of (social) services. This investigation uses a comparative approach, in the attempt to compare various European legal systems. Part II focuses on official statistics and data issues on both the supply and demand of social protection. Chapter 3 explores the availability of comparable statistics in Europe and in Italy at the sub-national level. Chapter 4 introduces small area estimation methods to derive accurate local indicators for unplanned domains. Chapter 5 offers an example of building an integrated dataset on children and on elderly social protection services for Italian provinces. Part III contains specific in-depth analyses which address issues in key areas, such as assistance to the elderly (Chapters 6 and 7), disability (Chapter 8), labor market and youth policies (Chapter 9 and Chapter 10, respectively), adopting demographic, juridical, economic and social perspectives. We thank the discussants and the participants to the Interdisciplinar