Inclusive Child Development Accounts: Toward Universality and Progressivity

Inclusive Child Development Accounts showcases the global context of emerging asset-building policies and programmes around Child Development Accounts.

Child Development Accounts (CDAs) are subsidized accounts that enable families to accumulate assets to invest in children’s development and life goals, such as postsecondary education, homeownership, business development, and retirement security. The vision for CDAs is to be universal (meaning everyone participates), progressive (meaning greater subsidies for the poor), and lifelong (meaning from the cradle to the grave). Since 1991, schools, communities, states, provinces, and entire countries have launched various CDA programs and policies. In the first part of the volume, scholars highlight the core feature of "inclusiveness" of CDAs in Singapore, Israel, and the United States. In the second part, scholars report on CDA policies and projects in Taiwan, Uganda, Korea, and mainland China.

Showing how asset building can be effective in diverse cultural and social contexts, and that all these contexts emphasize the investing in children early in life and empowering of them to achieve their potential as productive citizens, Inclusive Child Development Accounts will be of great interest to scholars of social work, policy, investment, and development, as well as financial inclusivity. It originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development.

Jin Huang is Associate Professor in Social Work at the College for Public Health and Social Justice, St. Louis University, USA.

Li Zou is International Director at the Next Age Institute and Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis, USA.

Michael Sherraden is the George Warren Brown Distinguished University Professor and Founding Director at the Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis, USA.