Socialist countries

It is as difficult to make generalizations about social welfare in socialist countries as it is in the case of the democratic societies referred to above. Nevertheless, in the foremost socialist societies the state provides the formal social services, and the workplace and the trade unions play a large part in service management and delivery. In these planned economies, where work is both a civic right and a formal obligation, social assistance for the unemployed is minimal. In the absence of firm data on this area of provision it must be presumed that families shoulder the main financial responsibility for many of the exceptional needs covered by discretionary provision in the West.

There are no professional social workers in China, nor were there any in the former Soviet Union; but social service workers perform similar functions, especially with regard to child protection and delinquency. The erstwhile Soviet Union had a long tradition of nurtured interdependence between the formal social services and a complex network of mutual aid, lay counseling, and supportive services. The latter were distributed by street, block, and house committees in the towns and cities, by agricultural collectives in the countryside, and by the parallel agencies of the trade unions and the Communist Party.

The Chinese system of social welfare is also strongly based on the industrial or agricultural workplace. Many essential social services, such as health care, are funded from the profits of collective work and administered by neighbourhood committees. Throughout the People’s Republic the guiding welfare principles are self-reliance and mutual aid. Although in exceptional cases families receive grants-in-aid to help with care for dependent relatives, Article 13 of the 1950 Marriage Law states that children and parents are jointly responsible for mutual support in hardship and old age. At the same time, extensive and sustained support is given to schemes of mutual support that extend to neighbourhoods and workplaces, and priority is given to the needs of dependent persons without families of their own.

The trend in the Balkan states has been toward the decentralization of personal social services and the promotion of neighbourhood voluntary work. State-sponsored organizations such as the Alliance of Friends of the Young and the Pensioners’ Associations act in conjunction with a growing network of professionally staffed social work centres financed by the 600 communities that are the basic units of local government. Developments similar to these can be seen in the other countries of eastern Europe where, as in China, there is a strong commitment to the expansion of informal provision for family dependents and neighbours.

Developing countries

In former colonies, such as Ghana, Sri Lanka, Jamaica, India, the Philippines, and Francophone Africa, the basic welfare services grew out of modified versions of the European poor laws, charitable and missionary activities, and the introduction of Western juvenile justice procedures. The oldest school of social work in Latin America was founded in Santiago, Chile, in 1925, and the Ratan Tata Foundation established the first Indian school in Bombay in 1936. New training institutions have since proliferated throughout the so-called Third World, many of them sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development.

In developing countries, where formal social services are generally under-resourced, traditional networks of informal care are the main source of assistance in adversity and old age. High rates of migration and unplanned urban growth, however, have weakened these networks in impoverished rural areas and overwhelmed the limited public services in new cities and towns. Indigenous overcrowding and poor housing, unemployment and low wages, and inadequate sanitation and endemic disease are not responsive to Western methods of personal social service intervention. Priority, often within severe economic restraints, must go to major programs of preventive health care, family planning, basic education, income support, and slum clearance. Nevertheless, community development work is also important in these processes of social development. In the poorest rural areas, where the majority of people live at or well below subsistence level, disaster relief is heavily supplemented by international aid agencies such as the United Nations and its associated agencies, including the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), charities such as Oxfam and the Save the Children Fund, and the governments of richer nations. In the longer term the enhancement of living standards depends on horticultural improvements, reforestation, water conservation, and those irrigation schemes that can be managed within small communities.