Therefore, we describe adult health outcomes as 'maternal' throughout the results section. Although we searched for parental health outcomes, the vast majority of the sample in all included studies were female. All but one study took place in North America. Interventions were either mandatory or voluntary and included up to 10 discrete components in varying combinations. Twelve studies involving 27,482 participants met the inclusion criteria. We synthesised data at three time points: 18 to 24 months (T1), 25 to 48 months (T2) and 49 to 72 months (T3). We contacted study authors to obtain measures of variance and conducted meta-analyses where possible. Two authors independently assessed risk of bias and the quality of the evidence. One review author extracted data using a standardised extraction form, and another checked them. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of mandatory or voluntary WtW interventions for lone parents in high-income countries, reporting impacts on parental mental health, parental physical health, child mental health or child physical health. We performed the searches in 2011, 2013 and April 2016. We identified many included publications by handsearching. We also searched bibliographies of included publications and relevant reviews, in addition to many relevant websites. We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), MEDLINE Ovid, Embase Ovid, PsycINFO EBSCO, ERIC EBSCO, SocINDEX EBSCO, CINAHL EBSCO, Econlit EBSCO, Web of Science ISI, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA) via Proquest, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) via ProQuest, Social Services Abstracts via Proquest, Sociological Abstracts via Proquest, Campbell Library, NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED) (CRD York), Turning Research into Practice (TRIP), OpenGrey and Planex. The secondary objective is to assess the effects of welfare-to-work interventions on employment and income. To assess the effects of WtW interventions on mental and physical health in lone parents and their children living in high-income countries. These and other interventions that affect employment and income may also affect people's health, and it is important to understand the available evidence on these effects in lone parents. 'Welfare-to-work' (WtW) interventions involving financial sanctions and incentives, training, childcare subsidies and lifetime limits on benefit receipt have been used to support or mandate employment among lone parents. Employment requirements for these parents are increasingly common. Lone parents in high-income countries have high rates of poverty (including in-work poverty) and poor health. We relate our estimates to existing theories of optimal government policy, and we discuss how the MVPF provides lessons for the design of future research.
Expenditures on adults have exceeded this MVPF range in particular if they induced large spillovers on children. We find smaller MVPFs for policies targeting adults, generally between 0.5 and 2. We find large MVPFs for education and health policies among children of all ages, rather than observing diminishing marginal returns throughout childhood. Many such policies have paid for themselves as the government recouped the cost of their initial expenditures through additional taxes collected and reduced transfers. Our results suggest that direct investments in low-income children’s health and education have historically had the highest MVPFs, on average exceeding 5. Comparing MVPFs across policies provides a unified method of assessing their effect on social welfare. We divide the willingness to pay by the net cost to the government to form each policy’s Marginal Value of Public Funds, or its ``MVPF''. For each policy, we use existing causal estimates to calculate the benefit that each policy provides its recipients (measured as their willingness to pay) and the policy’s net cost, inclusive of long-term effects on the government’s budget.
We conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half-century in the United States, focusing on policies in social insurance, education and job training, taxes and cash transfers, and in-kind transfers.
0 kommentar(er)
