Research

Since founding the PSSRU in 1974 to study issues of equity and efficiency in community and long-term care by developing and applying a 'production of welfare approach, Professor Davies’ work has increasingly focused on equity, efficiency and the reform of community care. Two main themes have been targeting and service productivities and efficiencies. Equity and Efficiency Policy: Needs, Service Productivities, Efficiencies and their Implications, written with José Fernandez, is a recent example, a sequel to Resources Needs and Outcomes in Community-Based Care, having the same focus and being based on a collection with the same design.

Professor Davies was awarded the BSG Outstanding Achievement Award 2013

Recent professional committments

Professor Davies was awarded an OBE for his ‘services to social science and social policy’, elected to the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, and to be a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America in 1993.  He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Public Health Association in 2007, and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the British Society of Gerontology ‘in recognition of significant and lasting contributions' to British Social Gerontology in 2013.

Recent publications

Current work includes revising a book based on the same collection, Fair and Efficient Targeting in Community Care. A third has been the development of care management, the focus on which he introduced to the UK through a set of experiments five books and numerous papers written from the1970s. The books include Matching Resources to Needs in Community Care, and Case Management, Equity and Efficiency: the International Experience. A fourth has been financing mechanisms and reforms of long-term care in other countries, a book combining that and the equity effectiveness and efficiency theme being Community Care in England and France.

Another focus has been work with the team developing models for the long-run projection of demand and supply in long-term care of which Raphael Wittenberg is principal researcher. Until the late 1970s, most of his two dozen authored books and his other publications had been focused on the development of a theme which during the late sixties caught the imagination of senior politicians in the Wilson administration from 1964, a ‘theory of territorial justice, Social Needs and Resources in Local Services, which developed methods of measuring variations in the need-generating circumstances of local authorities, and its two sequels explaining departures from territorial equity.

There were also books based on substantial ad hoc collection on the mitigation of the consequences of child poverty (Universality, Selectivity and Effectiveness in Social Policy), the economic and social consequences of gambling, and how differences in university resourcing affected the attainments of their students and research performance (University Costs and Outputs), written with Don Verry. An interest in local government reform led to becoming the founding editor of Policy and Politics, and he was the first international editor of an American journal, Journal of Ageing and Social Policy.