Professor Robert Walker

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd China's Dibao (Minimal Living Security System) is the world's biggest cash social assistance system serving 52 million people. However, Dibao is less effective at alleviating poverty in rural areas than should it be. The analytic concepts of targeting and institutional alienation (the mismatch between stated goals and true functioning) are applied in a village case-study to understand why. It appears that Dibao reaches some people considered self-evidently to be needy, but funds are diverted for purposes of rural governance and social control (reward, punishment and deterrence) and personal gain. Although culturally framed, the concepts and findings potentially have relevance to the global South and North.

© 2017 Department of Social Work, National University of Singapore, Singapore. This study establishes an evidence base regarding the experiences of older adults living in poverty in Beijing. Given the factors that shape the lives of low-income older adults, the findings are relevant for many middle- and low-income countries. Based on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with government officials and low-income older adults in Beijing, the study finds that poverty manifests as cumulative stress arising from four sources: financial strain, poor health, care burden and poverty-related shame. This stress is attributable to the co-existence of individual and structural factors that reflect the framing of anti-poverty policies in China.

© 2016 The Author(s). International Journal of Social Welfare © 2016 International Journal of Social Welfare and John Wiley & Sons Ltd While the reasons for low take-up of social assistance benefits are complex, stigma is understood to be an important factor. In this study, the proposition that financial need and social rights moderate the deterrent effect of stigma was examined with respect to China as a deviant case. Dibao, the world's largest social assistance scheme, is characterised by high take-up but poor targeting, stigma and informal discretion in the context of rapidly declining poverty. Qualitative fieldwork reveals how the contrasting stigmas of poverty and abuse are negotiated to claim benefits and illustrates the dangers of implementing social assistance without supportive political, legal and cultural infrastructures. Key Practitioner Message: • Dibao, the world's largest social assistance scheme, is characterised by high take-up but poor targeting; • The weakening of shame associated with injustice helps to account for the large number of ineligible people successfully claiming dibao; • The strengthening of shame linked to poverty helps to explain the low take-up of dibao by people experiencing poverty.

Although random assignment is generally the preferred methodology in impact evaluations, it raises numerous ethical concerns, some of which are addressed by securing participants' informed consent. However, there has been little investigation of how consent is obtained in social experiments and the amount of information that can be conveyed - and absorbed - prior to consent. This article reports on the implementation of the Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) program, a large social experiment in the United Kingdom. Procedures to elicit informed consent were generally scrupulously followed, but even so many participants appeared to have only limited understanding of the experiment and their involvement in it. The reasons for this are articulated and recommendations are made to help ensure, to the extent possible, that potential random assignment study participants adequately understand their situation and their choices. © 2008 American Evaluation Association.