Sweden and West Germany have had persistently high divorce rates in recent decades, but these two welfare states were differently equipped to mitigate the economic consequences of divorce for individual security in old age: Sweden followed a gender-equal policy approach to enable women and men to achieve economic autonomy, while West Germany, following the male-breadwinner model, introduced the system of ‘divorce-splitting’ to account for differences in women's and men's income. Against this background, this study uses large-scale register data from the German Public Pension Fund and the Swedish population registers to examine how divorce is related to the monthly public old-age pension income of women and men. The main comparison groups are divorced and (re)married individuals who entered retirement between 2013 and 2018. We descriptively show annual income histories from ages 20 to 65, and calculate monthly public old-age pension income with respect to lifetime income and pension regulations, such as the supplements/deductions for ‘divorce-splitting’. Multiple ordinary least square regression models further examine how family status relates to monthly public old-age pension income by gender. The results reveal that women and men in Sweden experience similar working histories, although women's incomes are lower. This is also reflected in women still having lower pension incomes than men. However, divorced and married women show comparable pension incomes, while divorced men receive approximately 26 per cent less pension income than married men. In West Germany, divorced women have significantly higher pension incomes than married women. The system of ‘divorce-splitting’ increases women's and decreases men's pension incomes, which seems to equalise their pension incomes. However, both stay below a married man's pension income. The findings indicate economic inequality in public old-age pension income by family status in Sweden and West Germany.

Research on the welfare state often examines social policies in democratic regimes separately from social policies in authoritarian regimes. Two bodies of research have emerged, as the extant literature views these political systems as sufficiently distinct to merit the division of analysis. In this article, we challenge the existing approach by showing that differing regime types can indeed be analysed together. By looking for patterns of similarities, rather than differences, we bring the two literatures into conversation and show how a common factor can trigger social policy expansion in both regime types. Using case studies of India and China, the two most populous democratic and authoritarian regimes, this article illustrates how the expansion of policies that serve low-income groups – India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) and China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme (dibao) – were both prompted by social mobilisation.

In 2008, the world underwent one of its worst economic and financial crises, whose consequences are still visible in some countries. This paper aims to analyse the impact of the crisis within the long-term care systems of Germany, England, Sweden and Spain from a comparative perspective. The time period analysed spans from the outset of the crisis in 2008, up to 2017. This article starts off from the thesis of the divergent impact of the economic crisis in these countries and the convergence between the impact of the crisis and long-term care contractions in the most afflicted countries. The outcome highlights the power of economic and financial pressures in order to explain the contractions within the care policies. Equally, it emphasizes the contradictions between the formal development level of the care systems and their practical institutional implementation in the field.

Cohabitation is a distinctive feature of low-income groups in Latin America. In the past, it has been linked to colonial legacies including notions of familial honour, poverty, and a kinship system focused on blood ties. By contrast, some scholars consider rising levels of cohabitation in the present day to be an effect of modernisation, through increased gender equality. The present research, based on life histories of young, poor, urban co-habitees in Chile, aims to show that rising cohabitation is linked to targeted social policies and also to declining patriarchy, which is distinct from gender equality.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes have spread across Latin America since the late 1990s. They constitute one of the major changes in social policy in Latin America in the last twenty years (Barrientos, 2009). This innovation has significantly influenced the welfare mix (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Those who examine the welfare mix from a feminist perspective (Orloff, 1996; Martínez, 2008) insist that it is necessary to take into account the gender consequences of changing this mix. Based on a qualitative analysis of CCT programmes in Peru and Bolivia, this article makes two arguments. First, CCT programmes demonstrate that instead of being purely liberal or even neoliberal, the actions of the state in the production of welfare are now grounded from the perspective of social investment. Second, in Peru and Bolivia, the gendered impacts of this new state orientation nonetheless reinforce maternalistic and coercive practices.

Conditional cash-transfer (CCT) programmes have been shown to improve the nutritional and health status of children from poor families. However, CCT programmes may have unintended and not fully known consequences by increasing the risk of overweight and obesity. We examined the impact of Familias en Acción (FA), a large CCT programme in Colombia, on the double burden of malnutrition among pre-school and school-aged children. Height and weight were measured before programme enrolment and during follow-ups in 1290 children from thirty-one treatment municipalities, being compared with 1584 children from sixty-two matched control municipalities. We used a difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the effect of FA on children’s stunting, BMI z-scores, thinness, overweight and obesity, controlling for individual and municipality-level confounders. At baseline, the prevalences of stunting and overweight were 30·3 and 15·4 %, respectively, in treatment municipalities and 27·9 and 17·4 % in control municipalities. FA was associated with reduced odds of thinness (OR 0·26; 95 % CI 0·09, 0·75) and higher BMI-for-age z-scores (BMI z-scores) (β 0·14; 95 % CI 0·00, 0·27; P<0·05), although the latter was of small clinical significance. The prevalence of stunting, overweight and obesity decreased over time, but the effect of FA on these outcomes was not significant. The CCT programme in Colombia reduced the odds of thinness, but had no effect on stunting, a more prevalent outcome. The FA programme had no effect on overweight or obesity, although BMI z-scores were higher for children under treatment, raising the possibility of an increase of small clinical significance on BMI among pre-school and school-aged children.