The European Parliament elections in May 2014 are about more than protest votes. In an opinion piece that appeared in The Guardian newspaper Christophe Crombez (The Europe Center) and Simon Hix (The London School of Economics and Political Science) argue that next year's European Parliament elections are the most important such elections to date. European politics has been dominated by the eurocrisis in recent years, and by the austerity policies European governments have followed to combat it. These policies are largely set at the European level, in particular by the EU Commission. At the next European Parliament election voters will be able to determine the composition of the new Commission, because the European Parliament now plays a crucial role in its appointment. Moreover, the major political parties present starkly different solutions to the crisis. European voters will thus have a clear choice to make at next year's elections.

Please click here to view the opinion piece.

We describe the degree to which household income is negatively associated with the prevalence of different types of disability (i.e. medical impairments) in China using data from the 2006 China National Sample Survey of Disabled Persons. We then calculate the extra costs of disability across different types of households and show how these costs differ by the type and severity of disability in both urban and rural areas. We finally use nationally-representative panel data on persons with disabilities from 2007 to 2009 to examine the degree to which social security measures are reaching persons with different types and severity of disabilities in both urban and rural areas. We conclude that while social assistance and insurance for households with disabilities is increasing rapidly over time, it is still not enough to offset the income differential between households with and without disabled persons, especially when accounting for the extra costs of living associated with disability.

The rapid expansion of enrollment capacity in China’s colleges since the late 1990s has come at the price of high tuition hikes. China’s government has put forth financial aid programs to enable poor students to access higher education. Although studies have shown that poor high school students are indeed able to attend college when their test scores are high enough (that is, few are unable to attend when they are qualified to attend), the literature has not explored whether poor students have sufficient amounts of aid to thrive in college.

 Using findings from a randomized controlled trial, this study evaluates the impact of providing full scholarships to students from poor rural areas (henceforth treatment students) on student stress levels, self-esteem/self-efficacy, and participation in activities in four first-tier colleges. To do so, we compare outcomes of the treatment students with students who were not given full scholarships by the project (and were left to search for scholarships and other sources of financial aid from the university system itself—the control students). The project was run among the 200 poorest first-year students in four first-tier colleges in inland China. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that treatment students (those receiving full scholarships from the project) were only slightly more successful in obtaining financial aid than control students. This suggests that control students (those who did not receive full scholarships from the project) were still able to access comparable levels of financial aid. Most importantly, scholarship recipients were statistically identical in outcome to control students in terms of stress, self-esteem, and participation in college activities, suggesting that poor students (who are dependent on aid from the university system) currently are able to access sufficient levels of financial aid, are able to take advantage of the activities offered at college, and do not shoulder heavy financial or psychological costs.

 We find, therefore, that efforts of the government to alleviate the financial burden of college on the poor have been relatively successful in first-tier colleges. Because of this, foundations and individuals may decide that if they want to improve human welfare, giving additional scholarships at high tier colleges may be having little effect.