Public and Private Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 1999
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses the shifting balance between public sector and private sector welfare provision in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. Five sectors - education, health, personal social services, housing, and income maintenance and social security - are examined over three time points, 1979/80, 1995/96, and 1999/2000. Burchardt's (1997) typology is used to classify welfare activities according to who funds them, who provides them, and who decides on the provider and/or amount of service. It is found that shifts in the composition of welfare activity have been relatively small and gradual: around half of all welfare activity, dropping from 52 percent to 49 percent, is entirely public; around a quarter, rising from 24 percent to 29 percent, is entirely private; and the remainder involves a mixture of both sectors. Within the latter group, there was a notable increase over time in the contracting-out of public services, which rose from 6 percent to 10 percent of all welfare activity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".