The research project FLOOR-B on social cash transfers in the global South, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) is drawing to a close after years of research in a team of researchers. Please find the data base, background information and outcomes of the project at www.floorcash.org. The research team is happy about any exchanges with colleagues who work in the field (contact: lutz.leisering@uni-bielefeld.de).
The Global Welfare Dataset (GLOW) (glow.ku.edu.tr) is a cross-national panel dataset that aims at facilitating comparative social policy research on the Global North and Global South. GLOW is an outcome of a comparative welfare politics research project, "Emerging Welfare," funded by the European Research Council (emw.ku.edu.tr) and based in Koç University in Istanbul.
You can find more information on GLOW and the EMW Project in the following Youtube videos:
GLOW:https://youtu.be/SjAhuzZCR08
EMW:https://youtu.be/Xlbqpcs3mn0
The GLOW dataset includes 381 variables on 61 countries from the years between 1989 and 2015. It covers comparable panel data on both Global North and South as we have compiled data from a large number of international and domestic sources, conducted compatibility checks, and standardized the data. GLOW provides comparable cross-national data on social assistance, as we applied the same methodology of the World Bank's ASPIRE dataset in order to build comparable indicators across developed and developing countries. We have also extracted employee and employer contributions from SSA reports for all case countries.
In addition to welfare policy indicators, GLOW covers three other main categories of data, namely development, economy, and politics. As such, it provides panel data not only for social policy scholars but for sociologists, economists, and political scientists, and other social scientists. Researchers will find a wide range of standardized panel data that can serve as independent, dependent, or control variables in their quantitative analyses. GLOW also provides visualizations of welfare policy indicators across time and geography, and scholars can use it for descriptive purposes, as well.
We very much hope that GLOW will contribute to the scholarly efforts to reach a global theory of welfare states and welfare regimes. It is an outcome of a collective three-year-long effort of the large team of international researchers of the Emerging Welfare project. I want to thank my colleagues for their effort in the creation of this dataset, and I hope that GLOW will be a useful source of comparative welfare policy research. I will appreciate it if you can spread the word in your circles and if you can send us any feedbacks on GLOW, as well.
Best wishes
Erdem Yörük
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Koç University
Associate Member, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
PI, Emerging Welfare ERC Project
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