Did Canadian welfare reform work? The effects of new reform strategies on social assistance participation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper measures the extent to which declines in social assistance (SA) participation were associated with novel and aggressive reforms referred to as new reform strategies: work requirements, diversion, earning exemptions and time limits. Controlling for province-specific benefit levels, eligibility requirements, GDP growth, labour market conditions and demographics, SAparticipation rates weremore than one percentage point lower (equivalent to a 13%decline) in provinceswith new reforms.Work requirementswith strong sanctions had the sharpest negative associations. New reform strategies explain at least 10%of observeddeclines in SAparticipation, twice that of benefit levels and eligibility requirements. Resume. Est-ce que la reforme de l’aide sociale est un succes? Les effets des nouvelles strategies de reforme sur la participation a l’aide sociale. Ce memoire mesure la taille du declin de la participation a l’aide sociale (AS) associee aux reformes inedites et agressives qu’on a nommees nouvelles strategies de reforme: travail requis, diversion vers d’autres programmes, exemptions de gains, et limites temporelles. Normalises pour tenir compte des niveaux de prestation specifiques aux provinces, pour les conditions d’eligibilite, pour la croissance du PIB, pour les conditions du marche du travail et la situation demographique, les taux de participation a l’aide sociale etaient plus d’un point de pourcentage plus bas (ce qui equivalait a un declin de 13 %) dans les provinces a la suite des nouvelles reformes. Les conditions de travail requis et les fortes sanctions attenantes ont eu l’impact negatif le plus fort. Les nouvelles strategies de reforme expliquent aumoins 10% du declin dans la participation a l’AS, soit le double de l’impact des changements dans les niveaux de prestation et des conditions d’eligibilite. JEL classification: H53, I38 The authors would like to thank Rodney Andrews, Sheldon Danziger, Chetan Dave, Jim Murdoch, Ahmed Saleh Alzahrani, Diane Richard at the National Council of Welfare, Jim Vajionis at Statistics Canada, Ron Kneebone, Gilles Seguin at Canadian Social Research Links and two anonymous referees, whose generous guidance and constructive criticism were substantially helpful and are gratefully acknowledged. Corresponding author: Nathan Berg, Nathan.Berg@otago.ac.nz New welfare reforms 495
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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 | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
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".