Events

New Insights Lecture on "Welfare Reform in America: Successes and Limitations"

Globalisation has stretched income distribution and resulted in wage stagnation among less-skilled and less educated workers. The government recently introduced workfare programmes as a way of supporting lower-income Singaporeans while strengthening the incentive to work. At the same time, increasing income inequality has raised questions over what kind of policy interventions can ensure social mobility for lower-income families.

In the search for policy solutions that are both economically efficient and socially equitable, Singapore looked to the welfare reform experience of the US, particularly in the state of Wisconsin. Singapore and Wisconsin share a number of similar institutional characteristics including a competent bureaucracy, high levels of trust in the government, and a strong work ethic. The Wisconsin Works (W2) experience, which made work a precondition for aid and provided generous support services for the working poor, was one of the motivations behind the workfare programmes that the Singapore government has rolled out.

This New Insights Lecture with a leading authority on the issues of poverty and welfare in the US, Professor Lawrence M. Mead, will focus on the effectiveness of welfare reforms in the US, and the extent to which they have enhanced incentives to work and raised social mobility. Prof Mead will also share with us the critical factors required for the successful execution of welfare reforms.

Speaker Profile

Lawrence M. Mead is a professor of politics at New York University, where he teaches public policy ad American government. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Princeton, the University of Wisconsin and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Professor Mead is an authority on the problems of poverty and welfare in the United States. Among academics, he was the principal exponent of work requirements in welfare, the approach that now dominates US national policy. He is also a leading scholar of the politics and implementation of welfare reform, subjects on which he has written several books and over a hundred publications. These works have helped shape welfare reform in the United States and aboard.

Government Matters, his study of welfare reform in Wisconsin, was a co-winner of the 2005 Louis Browlow Book Award, given by the National Academy of Public Administration. Professor Mead has consulted with federal, state, and local governments in the US and with several foreign countries. He testifies regularly to Congress on poverty, welfare, and social policy, and he often comments on these subjects in the media.

[Source: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/mead/mead_home.html]