Research Round-Up

Policy research is often concerned with quite ‘immediate’ problems such as whether a particular policy is working well or not. Such research often incorporates the definitions used by policy makers but Deborah Mabbett’s research is of a more fundamental nature. She takes a critical look at how disability categories are established in different European countries. The second piece also concerns a very broad issue – the effect of devolution on social security policy. It concentrates on Housing Benefit to discuss the tensions arising from the current division of responsibilities in relation to housing policy. The government set a deadline of 2004 to reduce the number of children in low-paid households by a quarter compared with 1998/99. This date is fast approaching and research highlighted here by the New Policy Institute suggests that the government still has a long way to go to achieve this. Having said that, the trend is in the right direction with some recent progress on reducing income poverty. Is self-employment a good way to escape poverty? Research, funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, reviews the evidence on self-employment as a route off benefits and concludes that we must be cautious with our conclusions as there is a lack of evidence on this subject. There is some evidence, however, to suggest that self-employment is a very precarious activity for many people. And finally, another study funded by the Department for Work and Pensions measured public attitudes to e-government. The findings suggest that the majority of people still rely on traditional methods for getting in touch with government but that there is some interest in using the Internet in the future

Devolution (biology · Economic growth · Economics · Government (linguistics · Political science · Poverty · Public economics · Public policy · Quarter (Canadian coin · Social security · Sociology · Work (physics · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies