The LSE Public Policy Review

The combined effects of globalisation, deregulation and automation have changed the employment relationships and patterns on which our social protection systems are built. In developed countries, flexible forms of employment or self-employment often combine with low wages and other employment conditions to generate cumulative disadvantages for workers in the labour market. Similar processes have affected low- and middle-income countries, where formal employment has become highly flexibilised, generating a new pattern of labour market segmentation between good and poor-quality employment, regardless of whether this employment would traditionally be considered to be formal or informal. 

These changes in the labour market affect our social protection systems and welfare state structures and pose a number of challenges: on the one hand, precarious jobs and contracts may interrupt and/or reduce both worker and employer contributions to social security and taxation systems, while they also simultaneously generate an increased need for income support during periods of unemployment or at retirement age, as well as increased need for support with other potential benefits, including those extended to children or other dependents. Do these developments undermine established social contracts? Are governments indirectly subsidising poor-quality employment through income support systems and other welfare state payments? Do these mechanisms contribute to entrenching inequalities? 

This symposium brings together scholars from across the LSE to explore policy responses and solutions to these problems, their potential trade-offs in different development contexts, and what can be learnt from common or divergent factors.

The welfare state plays a central role in managing risks and tackling vulnerability across the life-cycle. This entails particular relationships between individuals and between generations: for instance, under pay-as-you-go pension schemes, younger workers support the older generation through their contributions, with the prospect of benefitting from the scheme at a later stage in life; in funded schemes the mechanism is different but it remains the case that goods and services consumed by pensioners are produced by younger workers. The design and financing of welfare state institutions need to adjust to emerging social and economic changes, raising questions about the relationships that underpin those institutions.

These issues raise both empirical questions relating to efficiency and equity, and normative questions about the justifications of different policy approaches. At least two themes emerge. First, such questions involve exploring the nature of reciprocity as a normative principle of social cooperation, with a particular focus on life-cycle dynamics. Secondly, the theme allows to tackle practical issues in specific policy areas - towards older people in the case of pensions and social care and towards younger people in the case of education, the provision of childcare, and child support - in relation to both their design and their financing, questioning the role individuals and the state can/should play.

Rising concerns about income and wealth inequality have prompted renewed attention to questions about the role of the tax system in delivering a fair society. Within the social sciences, researchers from different disciplines have adopted a variety of normative and explanatory frameworks for thinking about ‘tax justice’; however, these perspectives have rarely been connected with one another.

We will attempt to synthesise key perspectives on tax justice and deploy these varied tools to address a range of pressing issues in tax design, including: drivers of public attitudes and major obstacles to reform; the relation between ‘tax expenditures’ and public spending; the distinction between avoidance and evasion and measures to improve tax compliance; and international dimensions of tax justice including cooperation and competition between states.

The symposium will focus on individual motivations and organisational incentive structures that create positive social and environmental impacts, or, more generally, that contribute to public benefit. In relation to individuals, the symposium asks questions in relation to the fundamental drivers of altruistic behaviour, their relationship to normative principles such as reciprocity and mutualism as well as practical questions regarding the policies, structures and processes that can lead people to do good, and do so more effectively.

At the organisational level, the symposium explores how societies rely on different private and third sector actors in order to promote public benefit. This includes considering the role of ‘hybrid’ organisations, such as enterprises with multiple aims that operate in the market while pursuing a social or environmental mission. Both at the individual and organisational level the symposium explores whether and how a self-interested incentives structure can sit alongside altruistic motivations, and whether this will lead one to crowd out the other.

In a world increasingly shaped by digital transformation, AI and data science present new opportunities to change policymaking in nearly all areas of policy. Yet the capabilities of these emerging technologies are still unfolding and need to be better understood, both in terms of their benefits and their limitations. The Data Science Institute and the Beveridge 2.0 Programme collaborate in this symposium bringing together experts from a range of disciplines - from philosophy to statistics, government and law - to reflect together on future directions, applications, and consequences of the use of AI and data science. Emerging technologies can transform evidence-based policy development through their analytical capabilities, predictive powers, and real-time monitoring, while also bringing questions around regulation, transparency, accountability and ethics to the fore.

The symposium will explore emerging challenges and the evolving landscape of gender research, including perspectives from law, communications, health and social policy, gender studies and economics. The convergence of these disciplines offers unique insights, enriching the policy discourse and reframing long-standing paradigms of gender roles, and relationships. The symposium will cover a range of topics, from global development or political representation to public health, workplace practices and gender inequalities as well as discussing legal concepts and media representations of women and work.