ABSTRACT
Social welfare systems are magnets for criticism. In developed countries, social welfare payments and their administration are near-constant targets for reform prescriptions due to their share of the total budget and the politics of redistributing wealth. Social welfare is an ‘impossible job of public management’ (Hargrove and Glidewell 1990), in the sense that no issue is ever ‘solved’ but only temporarily ‘resolved’. Far more than public spending on health and education, welfare involves redistributing wealth from one group of taxpayers to a different group – beneficiaries who are ‘at best out of sight and at worst deeply unpopular’ and include ‘drug abusers, child molesters, unemployed welfare recipients, teenage mothers, destitute residents of urban ghettos, and minority-group members’ (Lynn 1990: 136-137).
