Public expenditures on family-specific benefits, governance and child health outcomes
Başlık çevirisi mevcut değil.
- Tez No: 401251
- Danışmanlar: PROF. ANDREA VINDIGNI
- Tez Türü: Doktora
- Konular: Ekonomi, Economics
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Belirtilmemiş.
- Yıl: 2013
- Dil: İngilizce
- Üniversite: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies-Lucca (Scuola IMT (istituzioni, mercati, tecnologie)) di alti studi di Lucca
- Enstitü: Yurtdışı Enstitü
- Ana Bilim Dalı: Belirtilmemiş.
- Bilim Dalı: Belirtilmemiş.
- Sayfa Sayısı: 195
Özet
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Özet (Çeviri)
Lower child mortality may imply a higher rate of return to education, namely investments in human capital which is the prime engine for the economic growth. As Noble-laureate Amartya Sen convincingly argues that child mortality is an important indicator of economic success since being alive is already a necessary condition for our capabilities and it is helpful in the formulation of the public policy decisions. In other words, it is a good measure to understand how governments are successful and effective in public resource allocation(Sen98). Public spending on family-specific benefits are one of the public social welfare programmes which are mainly designed to support families for childbearing and childrearing activities (e.g childcare, schooling). The two most important public spending categories amongst family-specific policies are family allowances and the parental leave benefits. Family allowances and the parental leave benefits are especially designed for the children's well-being and the quality of life. This dissertation touches on the links between familyspecific policies, the governance of public resource allocation and the child health outcomes across OECD countries. The dissertation is composed of three main chapters. Chapter 2 Chapter 2 sheds light on the relationship between public spending on parental leave benefits and child health outcomes-proxied with the infant and under-five mortality rates- across OECD countries. Parental leave benefits are government-funded entitlements which are paid at a rate when parents are entitled to a leave period to care for their newborn or young children. Parental leave benefits are often a set proportion (wage replacement rates) of previous earnings. Replacement rates vary across countries. Similar to some prior literature which focuses on the association between public spending and development outcomes, overall findings explain a surprising result that public spending often does not yield the expected improvements in development outcomes. The main finding of this chapter reveals that there is no evidence for a significant relationship between parental leave benefits and child health outcomes across OECD countries. Chapter 3 The preliminary result on the lack of a relationship between public spending on parental leave benefits and child health outcomes may questionize the efficacy of the public resource allocation amongst social policy areas. Over the last three decades in the OECD area, public spending on parental benefits is one of the programmes with the low level GDP share. The reason behind this lack of a relationship between parental leave benefits and child health outcomes might be the insufficient allocation due to the crowding out effect of traditional social polices (e.g pensions, old-age) on new policies (e.g childcare). The population structure is a key driver of social welfare spending allocation across OECD countries where the big part of the social spending goes to the elderly population. According to the latest statistics of the OECD“Social Expenditures Database”(2009), overall total social welfare spending is estimated as 22% of GDP where spending on old age benefits and pensions are accounted for 11% of GDP. Compared to the old-age benefits and pensions, OECD countries redistribute less amount of their GDP towards familyspecific benefits. The share of the parental leave benefits was only 0.3% of GDP in 2009, while it was as high as 0.14% in 1980(OEC13f). This might be a rational response of vote-seeking politicians, since the population of many OECD countries are getting older, and voters over fifty are those with the greatest propensity to vote. It is the case where Down's(1957) benchmark model of democracy applies. It is characterised by complete policy commitment, policy choices reflect the preferences of the median voter. However, in policy making electorally accountable governments often fail to reflect the interests of the disadvantaged groups of race, gender, class(Pan03). In contrast to Down's Median Voter Theorem, more recent“Citizen Candidate Models”assign a role for the preferences of politicians. Following“Citizen Candidate Models”, there is a significant amount of research which has emphasized that preferences of female politicians matter in family-specific policy making which directly reflects women's interests. It is often emphasized in the literature that women are more likely than men to invest in children and favour redistribution and they often give priority to public policies related to their traditional roles as care givers in the family.(Tho90; BC00; Duf03; CD98; EP02; CD04; ALF05). In consideration of the persistent female under-representation and unfavourable reseource allocation towards parental leave benefits, Chapter3 has examined the link between female political representation, parental leave benefits and child health outcomes. The main finding supports the fact that low level of female political participation might be relevant for the insufficient resource allocation towards parental leave benefits. Chapter 4 The findings of the chapter3 can be interpreted in three ways; a) Once female political representation reaches a certain threshold in terms of bargaining power in policy-decision making, the interaction of female political representation and parental leave benefits would be significant on child health outcomes.However, the irrelevance of the interaction between parental leave benefits and female political representation on child health might not only be driven from the female underrepresentation in politics. b) Alternatively, the preferences of the woman who have been involved in policy decision could be closer to the preferences of their male collegues or to the interests of parties that they belong into. Therefore, female politicians who had been in the parliaments over forty years, might not really represent the preferences of women's citizens. c) Moreover, they might have even no preferences on a specific resource allocation. In other words, the relevance of female politicians on the lack of a relationship between parental leave benefits and child health outcomes would be consistent with the Median Voter Theorem which assumes that policy decisions only reflect the preferences of the median voters, therefore the gender of the politician does mot matter for policy decision making. The third chapter, therefore, investigates whether female politicians play a role in policy-making which reflects women's interests. To see the relationship between female political representation and family-specific policies from a broader view, I choose public spending on family allowances as the main field of the interest. Public spending on family allowances is one of the other family-specific social policy which play an important role in helping families for the childcare and child raising as well. Following the previous literature on critical mass, I identify four different thresholds which are equal to 15, 20, 25 and 30 per cent of female seats over the total parliamentary seats. Afterwards, I test for the existence of a critical mass threshold across OECD countries in order to examine whether the number of women at a certain threshold translates into more public spending on family allowances. Overall findings of the chapter4 may be driven by the fact that the fraction of female parliamentarians in OECD countries have not been sufficient for a possible gender effect in policymaking on family allowances. In other words, women's representation needs to reach a certain critical level to make an impact on the policy decision process. In fact, the fraction of female politicians is above a certain threshold (30%) shows a significantly different allocation of public spending on family allowances. Even though the overall thesis does not aim to support whether all those relationships are causally evident or not, the entire results are robust to using various different indicators for child mortality (neonatal, postneonatal and under-five mortality), to the inclusion of additional covariates and to different econometric specifications.This result suggests that the persistent under-representation of women in OECD parliaments might still be an obstacle for their efficiency in policy decision making on family-specific benefits. The problem of equal opportunities in entering to politics can be one of the reasons for the lowest rate of female participation in politics. By 2013, gender inequality in political participation across OECD countries still exist that there is no country which has reach to equal participation of women and men into politics. Sweden is the only country among OECD countries where male and female parliamentarians have nearly equal representation with 44.7% of female seats in the parliament. Moreover, the percentage share of the female seats are still less than one-third in 23 out of 34 countries across OECD.
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