IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/sticas/093.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Public and Private Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 1999

Author

Listed:
  • Rachel Smithies

Abstract

This paper analyses the shifting balance between public sector and private sector welfare provision in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. Five sectors - education, health, personal social services, housing, and income maintenance and social security - are examined over three time points, 1979/80, 1995/96, and 1999/2000. Burchardt's (1997) typology is used to classify welfare activities according to who funds them, who provides them, and who decides on the provider and/or amount of service. It is found that shifts in the composition of welfare activity have been relatively small and gradual: around half of all welfare activity, dropping from 52 percent to 49 percent, is entirely public; around a quarter, rising from 24 percent to 29 percent, is entirely private; and the remainder involves a mixture of both sectors. Within the latter group, there was a notable increase over time in the contracting-out of public services, which rose from 6 percent to 10 percent of all welfare activity.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel Smithies, 2005. "Public and Private Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 1999," CASE Papers 093, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:sticas:093
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cp/CASEpaper93.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tom Sefton, 2002. "Recent Changes in the Distribution of the Social Wage," CASE Papers case62, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    2. Hills, John, 2004. "Inequality and the State," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199276646.
    3. Tom Sefton, 2002. "Recent Changes in the Distribution of the Social Wage," CASE Papers 062, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Edmiston, 2011. "The Shifting Balance of Private and Public Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 2007," CASE Papers case155, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    2. Goodair, Benjamin, 2023. "‘Accident and emergency’? Exploring the reasons for increased privatisation in England's NHS," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    3. repec:ehl:lserod:43901 is not listed on IDEAS

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Miki Malul & Daniel Shapira & Amir Shoham, 2013. "Practical modified Gini index," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(4), pages 324-327, March.
    2. Callan, Tim & Keane, Claire, 2009. "Non-cash Benefits and the Distribution of Economic Welfare," The Economic and Social Review, Economic and Social Studies, vol. 40(1), pages 49-71.
    3. Tess Penne & Irene Cussó Parcerisas & Lauri Mäkinen & Bérénice Storms & Tim Goedemé, 2016. "Can reference budgets be used as a poverty line?," ImPRovE Working Papers 16/05, Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp.
    4. Tim Callan & Tim Smeeding & Panos Tsakloglou, 2008. "Short-run distributional effects of public education transfers to tertiary education students in seven European countries," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(3), pages 275-288.
    5. Reza Fazeli & Rafat Fazeli, 2010. "The Impact of the Welfare State and Social Policy on the Working Population: The Recent British Experience," Forum for Social Economics, Springer;The Association for Social Economics, vol. 39(2), pages 101-125, July.
    6. Alari Paulus & Holly Sutherland & Panos Tsakloglou, 2010. "The distributional impact of in-kind public benefits in European countries," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(2), pages 243-266.
    7. Cormac O'Dea & Ian Preston, 2012. "The distributional impact of public spending in the UK," IFS Working Papers W12/06, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    8. Zantomio, Francesca & Sutherland, Holly & Mullan, Killian, 2009. "Accounting for housing in poverty analysis," ISER Working Paper Series 2009-33, Institute for Social and Economic Research.
    9. d'Agostino, Giorgio & Pieroni, Luca & Procidano, Isabella, 2016. "Revisiting the relationship between welfare spending and income inequality in OECD countries," MPRA Paper 72020, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Panos TSAKLOGLOU & Christos KOUTSAMBELAS, 2008. "Distributional Effects of Public Education Transfers in Greece," EcoMod2008 23800144, EcoMod.
    11. Tim Callan & Tim Smeeding & Panos Tsakloglou, 2007. "Distributional Effects of Public Education Transfers in Seven European Countries," Papers WP207, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
    12. Tom Sefton, 2004. "A Fair Share of Welfare: Public Spending on Children in England," CASE Reports casereport25, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    13. Daniel Edmiston, 2011. "The Shifting Balance of Private and Public Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 2007," CASE Papers case155, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    14. repec:ehl:lserod:43901 is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Reza Fazeli & Rafat Fazeli, 2010. "The Impact of the Welfare State and Social Policy on the Working Population: The Recent British Experience," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(2), pages 101-125, January.
    16. Christos Koutsampelas & Panos Tsakloglou, 2011. "Short-run distributional effects of public education in Greece," University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics 12-2011, University of Cyprus Department of Economics.
    17. repec:cep:sticas:/126 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa, 2011. "Reflections on the enactment of children's participation rights through research: Between transactional and relational spaces," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 33(7), pages 1196-1202, July.
    19. Jane Waldfogel, 2007. "Welfare Reforms and Child Well-Being in the US and UK," CASE Papers case126, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    20. Paul Gregg & Jane Waldfogel & Elizabeth Washbrook, 2005. "Expenditure Patterns Post-Welfare Reform in the UK: Are Low-Income Families Starting to Catch Up?," The Centre for Market and Public Organisation 05/119, The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK.
    21. Sarmistha Pal & Robert Palacios, 2006. "Old Age Poverty In The Indian States: What Do The Household Data Tell Us?," CEDI Discussion Paper Series 06-08, Centre for Economic Development and Institutions(CEDI), Brunel University.
    22. Justin van de Ven & Nicolas Hérault, 2019. "The evolution of tax implicit value judgements, redistribution and income inequality in the UK: 1968 to 2015," Working Papers 498, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    welfare; social spending; privatisation; contracting-out; public provision; private provision;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
    • L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprise and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting Out

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:sticas:093. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case/_new/publications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.