JCS Focus|《社会政策与管理》最新目录与摘要

Informal childcare care by grandparents, other relatives or friends is an important source of support in many Western countries, including Germany. Yet the role of this type of care is often overlooked in accounts of social policies supporting families with children, which tend to focus on formal childcare. This article examines whether the large formal childcare expansion occurring in Germany in the last two decades has been accompanied by similar or opposite trends in informal childcare usage. It argues that accounting for both formal and informal childcare can offer a more accurate assessment of defamilisation effects of family policies. Drawing on representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel the analysis identifies long-run developments of childcare arrangements for children aged 1–10 between 1997 and 2020, offering for the first time a comprehensive picture of how families with children of different ages mix informal care and service provision. Results show that on average the expansion of formal childcare was not associated with an equal reduction in informal childcare, lending little support to the crowding-out hypothesis. Further analyses distinguishing between population groups with different propensity to use formal childcare reveal, unexpectedly, remarkable similarities in the use of informal care throughout the period examined. The only exception are families with a migrant background, who tend to use informal childcare less than their counterparts. The general trend is, however, one whereby informal and formal care are increasingly combined.

Old-age state pension is central to European welfare states. Despite the growing number of migrants in Europe, little is known about their attitudes towards state pension. Pension systems are designed for a ‘sedentary’ population, as they require many years of contribution or residency in the country. This often affects first-generation migrants, who arrive in the residence country only at a later point in their lives. In this paper, we draw on self-interest theory, which is commonly used to explain individuals' support towards welfare institutions and theorize on how the migration experience adds to the standard model of self-interest in relation to support for government spending on old-age state pensions. Hence, we move beyond traditional indicators of self-interest such as education and employment status and we test hypotheses on how migrant-specific characteristics like length of stay and settlement intention in the residence country are related to migrants' support for government spending on old-age state pensions. We use data from the Migrants' Welfare State Attitudes (MIFARE) survey (2016), the first cross-national survey that focuses on migrants' attitudes towards the welfare state that was collected in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands among nine different migrant groups from within and outside the EU. We find that migrants living in the country for over 5 years and those with longer settlement intentions have a higher support for government spending on pensions. We conclude that it is crucial to take migrants' unique migration experiences into account when assessing their attitudes towards state pension.

Developed nations have experienced a longstanding trend of reshaping the labour market's occupational structure. This trend, named job market polarization, describes how middle-level jobs have decreased their relative share of the labour market in favour of high- and low-complexity jobs. The literature has pointed to technological change as the main factor in setting this configuration, which accompanied the transition to a knowledge economy as a source of competitive advantages. Still, the narratives of technological change are anchored to specific technologies and times that do not fit the emerging challenges of the fourth industrial revolution and the increasing relevance of the digital economy. In this paper, I explore how job polarization dynamics have interacted with active labour market policies' effectiveness by focusing on job training skill premiums. I use nationally representative data to evaluate cross-sectionally and longitudinally the relationship between job training access, job polarization, and wages. The results show that polarization poses a wage penalty while it increases the relative value of training skill premium. I discuss how the setting of a polarized market could be considered for future skill-based interventions concerning digital technologies.