Henning Lohmann
In recent years family policy is receiving increased attention by researchers and policy makers. In this paper we discuss approaches to assess family policies in a broad comparative perspective. The paper draws heavily on earlier work carried out by the project "Towards a Framework for Assessing Family Policies in the EU" (Lohmann et al. 2009) commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Hence, the focus of this paper is on the EU and OECD countries. The interest in family policy is related to a number of different developments which affect the lives of families. The growth in employment rates entails the question how to balance work and family life for men and women. Child development and child well-being are deemed as increasingly important for later life outcomes such as education. In addition, in many industrialised countries around the globe population ageing is a perceptible truth. In order to evaluate which role family policy can play against the background of these developments detailed information is needed to compare family policy programmes and societal outcomes. The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the differences between existing approaches for an assessment of family policy. We use four criteria to categorize such approaches: the focus on family or single members of families, the assumed scope of family policy (which programmes are considered), the empirical perspective on family policy (which type of measures is used), and the method of aggregation to enable cross-country comparisons. In this paper, we discuss different approaches for an assessment of family policy according to these four criteria (Section 2, 3 and 4). In Section 5 we provide an overview on indicators an available data sources. In Section 6 we present an assessment of family policy using graphical scorecards, an approach proposed in Lohmann et al. (2009). The final section offers a brief summary.
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