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Working-age households where no-one is in work have become an increasing focus of policy concern even before the economic crisis, and the European Union (EU) has included household joblessness in its new poverty reduction target for 2020. This paper focuses on the variation across EU countries in the prevalence of household joblessness and its impact on income poverty and deprivation, and on the implications for the new EU poverty reduction target. It highlights first that there are some divergences across key data sources in the extent of joblessness. The prevalence of household joblessness varies substantially across EU countries, but there is little evidence of a consistent pattern among groupings of countries often categorized together in terms of welfare regime or geographically. In aggregate there is little association between the overall extent of household joblessness in a country and the percentage in relative income poverty or above a material deprivation threshold. At a micro level, being in a jobless household has a substantial impact on the likelihood of being in relative income poverty or deprived, but the scale of these impacts is shown to be very much greater in some countries than in others, and to vary between single-adult and multiple-adult households. In most EU countries little more than half the working-age adults in jobless households are either income-poor or deprived, so including joblessness in the poverty reduction target does make a difference, without a clearly articulated rationale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion, on the eve of the elaboration of policies designed to help reach the Europe 2020 target of lifting 20 million people out of poverty, it is important to take stock of the outcomes of the Lisbon agenda for growth, employment and social inclusion. The question arises why, despite growth of average incomes and of employment, poverty rates have not gone down, but have either stagnated or even increased. In this paper we identify the following trends: rising employment has benefited workless households only partially; income protection for the working-age population out of work has become less adequate; social policies and, more generally, social redistribution have become less pro-poor. These observations are indicative of the ambivalence of the Lisbon Strategy and its underlying investment paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Means-tested transfer schemes in Europe and elsewhere tend to include not only income tests but also asset tests of various sorts. The role of asset tests in minimum income protection provisions has been extensively researched in the Anglo-Saxon context. Far fewer authors have assessed the role of asset tests on social policy in a continental European context. Although asset tests may be useful in singling out the more deserving of the poor, we know relatively little of their actual impact on eligibility and social outcomes in European welfare states. This paper looks at the prevalence and design of asset tests in European minimum income protection schemes. We distinguish between two main types of asset tests: outright disqualification when assets reach a certain value, versus a more gradual tapering at a fictional rate of return. We then analyse in greater detail how asset tests in Belgium and Germany, as representatives of these two types, affect minimum income protection eligibility and poverty outcomes. We use the EUROMOD microsimulation model on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey data in order to assess the effects of asset tests. This survey was explicitly designed to more realistically reflect assets and capital incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the notion of 'social investment' (SI) has gained considerable traction in the political debates over welfare state futures. The multifaceted character of SI policy interventions, the effects of policy complementarities and interactions for different social groups and generational cohorts, and the challenge of delineating effects across different time dimensions, we argue, are not (yet) properly addressed by current empirical research. This paper contributes to reorienting the measurement of SI returns into a longer-term perspective, conceptualising them as people's work- and welfare- related outcomes. It operationalises in a novel fashion macro-level data across OECD countries to analyse the medium-term aggregate effects of SI stock, flow and buffer policies with a focus on arguably the most critical stages in the post-industrial life-cycle course: transition into employment and family formation. Our findings imply that the so-called 'Matthew effects', following the biblical proverb 'to him that hath shall be given', identified in previous research stem from a measurement of SI returns conceptualised in a short-term redistributive perspective. Moving on to longer-term returns to SI policies at the societal level reveals positive outcomes for families with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of changes in employment status on health within couples have attracted increasing attention. This paper contributes to this emerging research by investigating whether the impact of a partner's employment status on individual self-rated health varies systematically across countries with varying decommodification levels. We use longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and hybrid models. We find that a change in an individual's employment status may affect the health not just of the person who experiences this transition, but that of his or her partner. The likelihood that such a spillover will occur varies across countries with different decommodification levels. The negative effects of a partner's employment status on self-rated health are observed when the generosity of welfare state support is limited. The moderating effects of financial support from the state are not very strong, though. They are not robust across all our models and do not extend to all the dimensions of the generosity of welfare state support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly interest in the study of education from the perspective of political science has increased rapidly in the last few years. However, the literature focuses on comparing education politics at the country level, neglecting the analysis of micro-level foundations of education policies in terms of individual preferences and their interaction with macro contexts. This paper provides a first step in addressing this research gap, engaging in a multilevel analysis of survey data for a large number of OECD countries. The core research question is how institutional contexts – in this case socio-economic and educational inequalities – shape the micro-level association between the individual income position and support for education spending. The core finding is that these different dimensions of inequality have different implications at the micro level. Higher levels of socio-economic inequality enhance the conflict between the rich and the poor over public investments in education. By contrast, when access to higher levels of education is effectively restricted, the rich are more likely to support public education spending. This is because higher levels of educational stratification ensure that further public investments in education benefit the rich relatively more than the poor, who in turn become less willing to support this kind of public spending. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In what social contexts are rich people more likely to support government redistribution of income? Motivated by the literature on inequality aversion and the literature on the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and redistribution, the paper examines whether the relationship between own income and redistributive preferences depends on the regional level of poverty and the ethnic composition of the poor. Using data from the European Social Survey, the paper demonstrates that support for redistribution among the rich is lower when the proportion of ethnic minorities among the poor is high. Several possible mechanisms to account for this relationship are examined. The paper finds no support for explanations based on more animosity towards the poor or towards ethnic minorities and no support for explanations based on lower social trust or social capital: instead, rich people are less concerned with downward income mobility when the proportion of minorities among the poor is high. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, disappointing poverty trends and welfare state limitations in many European countries – including constraints on minimum income benefits – have paved the way for a larger role of the third sector. An interesting but controversial form of third-sector in-kind support is food aid provision. In Europe, food aid is, so far, a non-rights-based practice displaying worrisome discretionary and stigmatizing characteristics. Yet, the phenomenon of food aid in Europe has spread, professionalized, and penetrated the institutions of the welfare state. This raises the question if, how and to what extent food aid plays a role in bypassing structural constraints on minimum income protection. This article applies an exploratory case study approach to estimate the monetary value of food aid in relation to statutory minimum incomes in four EU-countries. We use cross-nationally comparable food reference budgets to price food aid packages in Belgium, Finland, Hungary and Spain. The results show that food aid, although not sufficient to close the at-risk-of-poverty gap, is non-trivial for some European households. In Spain and Belgium food aid packages can reach up to €100 a month (expressing 7% to 11% of respective minimum income benefit levels). Importantly, we perceive (formalized) cooperation and interaction between local welfare agencies and food charities in all countries, suggesting that welfare state actors use non-rights-based food aid for filling gaps in the social safety net. The large between- and within-country variation of the monetary values of food aid packages points, however, to food aid as a problematic discretionary practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the rise in employment, consistently high EU-average poverty rates continue to generate debates about the factors that explain the level and changes in the relative poverty rate, both within and across countries. Assuming a strong negative correlation between poverty and employment, the article investigates the role of four mechanisms responsible for this blurred relationship. Using decomposition analysis and macro-level regression analysis, we investigate the extent to which (i) the distribution of employment across households with different levels of work intensity, (ii) the expansion of non-standard work, (iii) the change in the effectiveness of social welfare systems, and (iv) the change in median income and the corresponding shift in the poverty threshold have contributed to changes in relative income poverty in the last decades. We found that employment growth benefits poverty reduction, but this positive effect was partially offset by the precarious characteristics of some newly created jobs. If the distribution of jobs had favoured the jobless more in the pre-crisis period, the relative income poverty rate would have been lower. Although the share of persons in jobless households decreased during the recovery years, their risk of poverty increased due to the retrenchment of social transfers during and after the Great Recession. Furthermore, the use of a floating threshold, which is linked to changes in median income, underestimates the strength of the relationships between poverty, employment and social transfers: when the poverty threshold is kept fixed, not only do the dynamics of poverty look different, but the estimated coefficients are considerably larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the European Union (EU) increasingly strengthens its social integration, opposition towards this process can also be observed, here defined as 'welfare Euroscepticism'. To better understand this newly defined policy paradigm, this article aims to explain longstanding cleavages in both social policy and EU research: socioeconomic status (SES) divides. Contrary to the literature on public support for European integration, this article argues that higher SES groups are more likely to be welfare Eurosceptics than lower SES groups. This argument and its underlying explanations are examined through a multilevel approach using European Social Survey data from 18 EU member states, using the example of a potential EU-wide minimum income scheme. First, the results demonstrate that welfare Euroscepticism is indeed more prevalent among higher SES groups than lower SES groups (measured through occupation, education, income, and employment). The results indicate robust self-interest patterns among higher SES groups that do not want to carry (perceived) financial burdens of EU social policies. The opinion patterns also emphasize the multidimensionality of attitudes towards EU policies since the SES cleavages can reverse, depending on the policy in focus. Overall, the results indicate much potential to mobilize the larger proportion of the public to support EU social policies, that is, lower SES groups. However, potential conflicts may arise when the EU expands on policies that their traditional supporters – higher SES groups – are more likely to oppose. The article also shows that welfare solidarity on the individual and the country level can mitigate such conflicts. This is because higher levels of welfare generosity and lower levels of welfare chauvinism on the individual and the country level are related to smaller SES cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to develop an alternative measure for relative poverty. The aim is to combine information both on the depth of poverty and the number of people living in poverty. We seek, moreover, to establish a yardstick that would be relatively simple and easy to understand, so as to facilitate the use of such a new method in sociological poverty research and political decision making. The Cumulative Poverty Index (CUPI) indicates how many times poorer on average the poor households are, compared to all households on average (or the other way round: the ratio of the mean income of poor households to the mean income of all households). The empirical analysis demonstrates that CUPI seem to reflect changes in the incomes of the poor more accurately than do head-count ratios based on median income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Socioeconomic consequences of pension reforms have often been discussed without careful consideration of institutional contexts, despite the fact that institutional designs of public pensions differ substantially across countries. This study argues that the outcomes of pension reforms vary depending on the institutional structure of public pensions, by showing that the associations between public pension spending and old-age employment rates of different socio-demographic groups vary across different institutional contexts. Using time-series cross-section data from 20 European countries and the United States from 1998 to 2019, the study examines how changes in public pension spending 'per older person', a comparable measure for the welfare state effort towards old-age income security, are associated with gender- and education-specific employment rates in old age. The study also explores how these associations differ under different pension regimes, constructed based on the degree to which financing and benefit structures exhibit redistributive orientations. The results reveal complex gender and educational gradients in the relationship between public pension spending and old-age employment. Female employment rates, especially among the low-educated, are more sensitive to changes in pension spending in the 'Beveridgean' regime that focuses on basic income security. In the Bismarckian regime characterized by earnings-related pensions, educational differences in the marginal effects on male employment rates are, in particular, larger. Future pension reforms balancing the goal of activation and social equity should therefore consider the longstanding institutional design of public pensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages represents a watershed initiative adding substance to the EU's social dimension. It contains two ambitious objectives: establishing the minimum level of statutory minimum wages at 60% of the gross median wage, and increasing collective bargaining coverage (CBC) to at least 80% of workers. In this article, we assess how statutory minimum wages and collective bargaining coverage are associated with the likelihood of low pay. Using a time series cross-section of EU-SILC for income years 2004–2019, we identify and assess the absolute and relative size of 'effective wage floors' for full-time employees in 30 countries. We specify multilevel, random effects within-between regression models to assess the individual and joint associations of SMW and collective bargaining coverage with wage floors. Our results indicate that SMWs and CBC both have distinct roles in establishing the effective wage floor. First, higher collective bargaining coverage is on average associated with a lower share of workers earning below 60% gross median wages. Second, higher SMWs are strongly associated with higher effective wage floors. Third, both collective bargaining coverage and union density are strongly associated with higher wage floors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the structure of social policy institutions shape the level of public support for the welfare state? The policy feedback literature predicts that highly inclusive welfare institutions generate larger bases of public support by shifting the focus away from redistribution and toward common market insecurities felt across classes, while more selective strategies erode support by highlighting the conflicts of interest imbedded in clearly redistributive social programs. This paper expands on existing research by adopting a disaggregated approach to measuring both welfare state structure and public support, uncovering important cross-program variations in public attitudes and welfare state design masked by traditional measures of universality and public support. This project applies this method to public opinion data in 17 advanced capitalist democracies across three policy areas: healthcare, pensions, and unemployment. The findings offer evidence of policy feedback effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare state typologies are generally based on the institutional design of welfare policies. In this paper we analyse whether such typologies also persist when they are applied to effective redistributive outcomes of welfare states’ tax and transfer policies. In contrast to the widespread use of macro indicators, our empirical analysis relies on internationally comparable microdata in order to account for the distribution of resources across households. We perform a hierarchical cluster analysis and check whether the classical typology for Western European welfare states reproduces the typical patterns when it comes to effective economic outcomes. We find that the established welfare regimes not only differ in their welfare state institutions as is known, but also in their economic outcomes. In particular, we identify the social-democratic, conservative, liberal and southern welfare regimes. Belgium and the Netherlands emerge as hybrid cases lying between the social-democratic and conservative model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that immigration has varying implications for attitudes about government redistribution depending on the level at which immigration is experienced. Working in occupations with higher shares of foreign-born employees can raise individual economic insecurities in ways that might overwhelm the way high foreign-born shares of the population can reduce solidarity or increase fiscal burdens. Hence, experiencing more immigration in one’s occupation might more positively affect support for government redistribution than does experiencing more national-level immigration. We test this and other expectations on survey data in 17 European polities, focused on occupational and national measures of immigration. While national-level exposure to foreign-born populations tends to have little effect on support for government redistribution, occupational-level exposure to immigration tends to spur such support. These results suggest that immigration directly influences the politics of inequality, but in ways more complicated than recent scholarship suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to test whether motivations characteristic of homo reciprocans, as described in experimental economics, can account for the support for the redistributive role of the State. Using data from the 2008 European Social Survey, we show how this picture of human motivations provides a fertile framework to interpret support for redistribution among the general public. We test this claim through two ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. The evidence clearly shows that variables associated with ‘reciprocity’ are better predictors of support for the redistributive role of the State than those associated with ‘self-interest’, including the traditional socioeconomic variables, although both types of variables offer useful insights into the question of why people give support for redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the high rates of female full-time employment in Portugal and examines whether these are consistent with the familialistic features that typify the southern European social model. It employs a comparative methodology to investigate the extent to which recent policy developments and current social values in Portugal are aligned with the familialistic southern European tradition or whether they signal a departure from the model. The analysis reveals that the high rates of female employment are associated with particular features of the case of Portugal, namely, lower gender-based labour market segmentation and welfare state support for dual-earner families. However, this study also shows that the country still retains familialistic characteristics, which are particularly visible in the organization of care and in the persistence of traditional gender values. The article contributes to debates on the southern European social model and sheds light on how high female employment levels can be compatible with relatively high levels of familialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how income poverty is affected by changes to the scale of tax-benefit policies and which are the most cost-effective policies in reducing poverty or limiting its increase in seven diverse EU countries. We do that by measuring the implications of increasing/reducing the scale of each policy instrument, using microsimulation methods while holding constant the policy design and national context. We consider commonly applied policy instruments with a direct effect on household income: child benefits, social assistance, income tax lower thresholds and a benchmark case of rescaling the whole tax-benefit system. We find that the assessment of the most cost-effective instrument may depend on the measure of poverty used and the direction and scale of the change. Nevertheless, our results indicate that the options that reduce poverty most cost-effectively in most countries are increasing child benefits and social assistance, while reducing the former is a particularly poverty-increasing way of making budgetary cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses temporal patterns in social assistance receipt in Sweden in the 2000s by looking at which circumstances facilitate versus reduce the possibilities of a person ceasing to be a recipient of social assistance. The analysis is guided by the following questions: What conditions lead people to terminate periods of social assistance receipt? Which factors are central to exits with different subsequent income patterns? How do these explain the different situations of recipients prior to termination? We focus particularly on income maintenance prior to spells of social assistance. We use event history data on monthly social assistance take-up covering the total adult Swedish population for the years 2002–2004. We adopt a gamma mixture model to control for unobserved heterogeneity. The results suggest that previous experience of both employment and social assistance receipt are important determinants for all types of exits from social assistance recipiency. A negative duration dependence is found also when unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines whether and to what extent three recently implemented family policies in Sweden change incentives regarding employment and choice of childcare for parents of young children, and whether these incentives differ by income level. These policy innovations warrant close examination because they represent a decisive ideological shift from what was a coherent set of policies that created incentives for high levels of female employment and that has been identified as a model of best practice in Europe. Simulating the economic incentive effects of the three new policies for heterosexual couple families with different levels of income, we find that while family policy in Sweden continues to provide the strongest support for a model of gender equality that combines full-time dual earning with public childcare, alternative organizations of family life are now more affordable. Nonetheless, the extent to which the costs of deviation from this model have changed varies by income level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses harmonized data for the member states of the European Union to analyse household income packaging from a ‘welfare regimes’ perspective. Using data from the third wave of the ECHP, it looks at how the role of welfare transfers in the income package varies across countries and welfare regimes, and assesses whether this is consistent with the predictions of welfare regime theory, having first elaborated some specific hypotheses in that regard. It finds that when one focuses on averages across countries categorized into regimes, many of these hypotheses about the role of transfers are in broad terms borne out by the evidence. However, when one focuses on individual countries rather than regime averages the picture is a good deal more complex and consistency with the range of hypotheses more limited. It is essential that this variation across countries is taken into account in interpreting and using welfare regime theory and typologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the drivers of preferences about tax progressivity and redistribution are well identified, the study of willingness to pay taxes remains underdeveloped. This article uses the 2016 ISSP on the Role of Government and the 2018 OECD Risks that Matter surveys to identify which groups of voters are more likely to be willing to pay taxes. It shows that ideology mediates the correlations between education or income and willingness to pay. Among the left, income and education tend to have a positive association with willingness to pay taxes, whereas both variables are negatively associated with willingness to pay among the right. Thus, the core constituencies of left-wing parties composed of socio-cultural professionals and of production and service workers have different tax policy preferences. Socio-cultural professionals, with their higher education and income, are significantly more willing to pay taxes than production and service workers, who share lower education and income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an age-group, young people are most at risk of poverty. Yet significant cross-national variation persists, which seems puzzling: the countries displaying the highest levels of youth poverty are (uncharacteristically) Nordic. How can such diversity be accounted for? Is the welfare state part of the story? First, I argue, unlike most studies, that in order to measure youth poverty it is better to use material deprivation and subjective poverty indicators, rather than income poverty. Second, I hypothesize that the welfare state has two potential routes to the alleviation of youth poverty. On the one hand, via 'individualization' of claims (allowing young people to claim benefits as full adult citizens), access to income support leads to lower levels of youth poverty. On the other, youth poverty levels can also be reduced through investment in young people's human capital, in line with the 'social investment' strategy. These claims are confirmed by multilevel logistic regressions on three waves and across 23 European countries of the Eurofound's European Quality of Life Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimum wages are increasingly discussed as an instrument against (in-work) poverty and income inequality in Europe. Just recently the German government opted for a substantial ad-hoc increase of the minimum-wage level to €12 per hour mentioning poverty prevention as an explicit goal. We use the introduction of the federal minimum wage in Germany in 2015 to study its redistributive impact on disposable household incomes. Based on the German Socio-Economic Panel we analyse changes in poverty and income inequality investigating different mechanisms of the transmission from individual gross wage-rates to disposable household incomes. We find that the minimum wage is an inadequate tool for income redistribution because it does not target poor households. Individuals affected by the minimum wage are not primarily in households at the bottom of the income distribution but are spread across it. Consequently, welfare dependence decreases only marginally. The withdrawal of transfers or employment effects cannot explain the limited effect on poverty. Complementary simulations show that neither full compliance nor a markedly higher level of €12 per hour can render the minimum wage more effective in reducing poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether unemployment insurance benefit generosity impacts divorce, drawing on full population administrative data and a Swiss reform that reduced unemployment insurance maximum benefit duration. We assess the effect of the reform by comparing the pre- to the post-reform change in divorce rates among unemployed individuals who were affected by the reform with the change in divorce rates among a statistically balanced group of unemployed individuals who was not affected by the reform. Difference-in-differences estimates suggest that the reform caused a 2.8 percentage point increase in divorce (a 25% increase). Effects were concentrated among low-income couples (+58%) and couples with an unemployed husband (+32%) though gender differences are attributable to men's breadwinner status. Female main breadwinners were more strongly affected (+78%) than male main breadwinners (+40%). Results confirm the 'family stress model' which posits that job search and financial stress cause marital conflict. Policymakers should consider a broad array of impacts, including divorce, when considering reductions in unemployment insurance generosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a static microsimulation model based on a link between survey and administrative data, this article investigates the effects of the pandemic on income distribution in Italy in 2020. The analysis focuses on both individuals and households by simulating through nowcasting techniques changes in labour income and in equivalized income, respectively. For both units of observations, we compare changes before and after social policy interventions, that is, automatic stabilizers and benefits introduced by the government to address the effects of the COVID-19 emergency. We find that the pandemic has led to a relatively greater drop in labour income for those lying in the poorest quantiles, which, however, benefited more from the income support benefits. As a result, compared with the 'No-COVID scenario', income poverty and inequality indices grow considerably when these benefits are not considered, whereas the poverty increase greatly narrows and inequality slightly decreases once social policy interventions are taken into account. This evidence signals the crucial role played by cash social transfers to contrast with the most serious economic consequences of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimum income schemes aim at providing citizens with a minimum living standard. In some EU countries, their regulation and provision takes place at the subnational level. This is the case in Spain, where minimum income schemes are a heterogeneous and complex collection of regional benefits designed and implemented at the regional level, by the Autonomous Communities. In June 2020, a complementary nationwide minimum income scheme was implemented. In this context, we use the European microsimulation model EUROMOD, together with microdata from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, to comprehensively assess the performance of the whole minimum income system. We simulate a sequence of theoretical scenarios, considering different degrees of coverage and adequacy of these benefits and show that extending the coverage of the regional schemes would significantly alleviate poverty. However, it would not be sufficient to eliminate it and further increases in the benefit amounts would also be required. Furthermore, the new nationwide minimum income can potentially reduce the shortfall in income from the poverty line, if cost-shifting practices from the regional to the national budgetary level are limited. We discuss the importance of this case study in light of the decentralization of minimum income policies and derive some general policy implications. JEL classification: H53, H75, I38. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades of debates on the economic and philosophical merits and shortcomings of a universal basic income (UBI), more recent literature has started to investigate the politics of a UBI. While several studies shed new light on the individual characteristics associated with higher or lower support for a UBI, we still do not know what features of a UBI itself are attractive or not to people, nor whether other slightly different policy alternatives like means-tested and minimum incomes would be more popular. This article addresses this gap by employing a conjoint experiment fielded in Finland, where a UBI has received significant media and political attention. Our findings show that the most contentious dimension of a UBI is – surprisingly – not its universality, but instead its unconditional nature. Individuals are more likely to support policies that condition receipts upon searching for employment or being genuinely unable to work, and less likely to support policies that are fully unconditional. On the funding side, support tends to be lower for a UBI that is linked to reducing existing benefits, but higher if the UBI is to be funded by increasing taxes, especially on the rich. These findings contribute to a wider literature on the politics of UBI and to our understanding of the potential popularity of competing policy reform alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses programmes of cash allowances for children and compares their effectiveness in combating child poverty in Russia and four European Union (EU) countries representing alternative family policy models – Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Using microsimulation models, this article estimates the potential gains if the Russian system were re-designed along the policy parameters of these countries and vice versa. The results confirm that the poverty impact of the programme design is smaller than that of the level of spending. Other conditions being equal, the best distributional outcomes for children are achieved by applying the mix of universal and means-tested child benefits, such as those employed by the United Kingdom and Belgium. At the same time, the Russian design of child allowances does not appear to be less effective in terms of its impact on child poverty when transferred to European countries in place of their current arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involuntary retirement transitions have a variety of negative consequences for individuals and society as they can lead to poorer health or lower wellbeing. Therefore, it is of high relevance to better understand the factors influencing the voluntariness of retirement transitions. A systematic literature review was conducted to identify the known determinants of the voluntariness of retirement. Our final review includes 14 studies that empirically investigate this topic. Differentiated by micro-, meso- and macro-levels, we present the identified factors and discuss different ways of operationalizing voluntary or involuntary retirement. We found that most studies analyse individual factors. There is a gap in research on influencing factors at the company level as well as the welfare state level. In addition, it is of interest to examine whether and to what extent pension and labour market policy reforms have led to changes over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The methodology currently used to measure poverty in the European Union faces some important limitations. Capturing key aspects of poverty is done using a dashboard of indicators, which often tell conflicting stories. We propose a new income-based measure of poverty for Europe that captures in a consistent way in a single indicator the level of relative poverty, the intensity of poverty, poverty with a threshold anchored in time and a pan-European perspective on poverty. To do so, we work with a recently developed poverty index, the extended headcount ratio (EHC) and derive the relevant poverty lines to apply the index to poverty in Europe. We show empirically that our measure consistently captures the aspects typically monitored using a variety of indicators and yields rankings that seem more aligned with intuitions than those obtained by these individual indicators. According to our measure, Eastern Europe has a much higher level of poverty than Southern Europe, which, in turn, has a considerably higher level of poverty than North-Western Europe. In North-Western Europe, the evolution of our measure over time correlates most strongly with the at-risk-of-poverty rate, while in Southern and Eastern Europe, it correlates most strongly with at-risk-of-poverty with the threshold anchored in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a general trend of increased marketization of long-term care (LTC) services across Europe, with the natural consequence that market forces will affect the supply of LTC. At the same time, there has been a rapid increase in the use of home-based provision for those requiring LTC support. However, there is little evidence about what the effects of growing domiciliary care provision has on the markets for institutional forms of care. This is important from a policy point of view in terms of managing local markets, access to services, the quality of services and inequality. Using data from England for all care homes and domiciliary care providers registered to provide care to older people during 2014–2016, we assessed if increased domiciliary care supply was linked to increased likelihood of care home closure. Using Cox proportional hazard models of care home closure controlling for care home characteristics including quality and local area measures of needs and income, the findings provide no evidence that domiciliary care provision is a substitute for care homes. In some specifications, there was even a complementary relationship between the two forms of social care: increased domiciliary care supply significantly reduced the likelihood of care home closure. Potential reasons for the complementary relationship and implications for European LTC policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased income inequality, and policies that can limit its further growth, are an important issue for citizens, politicians and the media. Numerous empirical studies have measured political support for redistributive policies by asking whether the government should equalize gaps between rich and poor. They try to discover whether 'redistributive' policies are supported by public opinion and are therefore politically feasible. This research note argues that the standard instrument measures diffuse support for more equality, but gives rather vague hints if this support is transformed into a political mandate for redistributive programmes. With regard to the way in which the political demand for state redistribution to reduce income inequality has been raised so far, methodological critique and innovation is largely lacking. This article therefore tests the validity of the standard item. It argues that the conventional measurement only captures a general 'inclination' towards the idea of equality. However, since the item phrasing is unspecific, other orientations confound the answers, so that ultimately the predictive power in terms of political behaviour is low. The standard item measures egalitarian preferences with inconsistence. This limits its reliability, so that hardly any conclusions can be drawn regarding voting for left parties or support for redistributive programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging consensus claims that 'subjective' (mis)perceptions of income inequality better explain redistributive preferences than actual 'objective' conditions. In this article, we critically re-assess this view. We compare perceived and actual income positions as predictors for preferences for redistribution. We argue that perceived income is partly endogenous to actual income and its effect on preferences conditional on ideology. Using an original survey experiment from Switzerland, we show that the predictive power of perceived income is lower compared to actual income. Perceived income is only associated with redistribution preferences among centre-right respondents, but not among left-wing respondents. Furthermore, providing respondents with corrective information about their true position in the income hierarchy has no effect on redistribution preferences. These findings go against the new consensus about the superior explanatory power of subjective perceptions of income inequality. We argue instead that absolute objective conditions should be at the centre of explaining redistributive preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite clear limitations, poverty research in the rich world overwhelmingly relies on income-based measures. Households may have significant savings and assets that they can draw on to boost their living standards, but may also have debts that depress the living standard they can actually achieve with their disposable income. Using data from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), this article offers a picture of poverty in 17 EU countries that takes into account assets and debt, using various approaches. While earlier studies have found that poverty rates tend to be lower when wealth is accounted for, this study highlights the situation of those who become or remain poor even when savings and assets are included. It focuses both on within-country patterns of joint income–wealth poverty and on cross-country differences. It is shown that the elderly are generally less prone to being poor once assets are accounted for. However, for renter households with a young, female, low educated, unemployed or inactive and single head, the risk of being poor when assets and debt are accounted for remains high and in some cases even increases. That is generally the case because they have few assets, rather than because of high debts. The substantial variation in poverty rates observed across countries can to some extent be accounted for by socio-demographic factors, but a lot of variation still remains unaccounted for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enormous growth in house prices in Europe since the 1990s has led to increasing concerns about the affordability of housing for ordinary citizens. This article explores the relationship between housing affordability – house prices relative to incomes – and the demand for redistributive and housing policy, using data drawn from European and British social surveys and an analysis of British elections. It shows that, as unaffordability rises, citizens appear in aggregate to become less supportive of redistribution, interventionist housing policy and left-wing parties. However, this aggregate rise, driven by the predominance of homeowners in most European countries, masks a growing polarization in preferences between renters and owners in less affordable regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and policymakers who call for social investment (SI) policies hope that SI policies reduce income inequality and poverty, among other policy goals. Meanwhile, some others point out potentially less pro-poor effects of SI policies. There are relatively few cross-national studies that empirically examine the distributional effects of SI policies. The current study seeks to fill the gap by investigating the effects of SI policies on income inequality in OECD countries. The empirical analysis finds mixed results. Parental leave benefits reduce market income inequality, but other family support policies do not lessen inequality, and family allowances and paid leave (the length of generous leave) even increase it. The effects of some family policies are partly context-specific. In contexts where there are a large number of single-mother households, parental leave benefits reduce market income inequality. There is no stable evidence that education and active labour market policy (ALMP) reduce market income inequality. Education and ALMP, however, reduce disposable income inequality (even after controlling for left governments and Nordic countries). The article suggests that in countries with high education and/or ALMP spending, the skills of workers towards the lower end of the income distribution may be relatively high (even though their pre-tax and transfer income may be low), and it may make their income salvageable with redistributive policies. In this sense, SI policies and conventional redistributive policies may be complementary in reducing disposable income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young EU citizens are encouraged to enhance their 'employability' by taking advantage of intra-EU mobility, but, for many, moving to another EU country can instead generate disadvantages in the labour market. Drawing on a qualitative study on the experiences of university-educated young Nordics and southern Europeans working in precarious jobs in Brussels, we examine how their access to income support in the context of mobility shapes their access to financial independence. We argue that the variation in European welfare models regarding young peoples' social entitlements impacts this access in multiple and complex ways. The article advances a tripartite approach that looks at the regulation and enforcement of conditionality of social entitlements on the levels of EU, their country of origin and their country of destination. The analysis shows how, in Belgium, precarious EU migrant citizens are denied access to income support due to the interplay between general welfare conditionality for all claimants and recently reinforced conditionality affecting EU migrant citizens in particular. In these situations, the de-familialising Nordic welfare models showed an aptitude for shielding their young citizens. The young southern Europeans, on the other hand, often had no access to income support in any country, which forced them to choose between family dependency and unfiltered exposure to precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proportion of total parental leave days taken by fathers has increased in all Nordic countries almost hand in hand with parental leave reforms. However, the average pattern of fathers' parental leave uptake hides the fact that a considerable proportion of fathers use no parental leave, even when they are earmarked for the father. In this study, we focus on the proportion and characteristics of non-users, that is, fathers who do not use parental leave. We distinguish two non-user groups: fathers who use no parental leave, not even birth-related leave and fathers who do not use the father's quota. This distinction is relevant because it reflects the design and institutional status of fathers' parental leave. Further, factors related to using no parental leave are likely to be somewhat different to those related to not using the father's quota. In Finland, the father's quota was introduced in 2003, but it became fully independent leave for the father only in 2013. We also investigate if the 2013 reform was followed by any changes in fathers' parental leave use and in the profiles of non-users. We use a unique longitudinal register data that covers practically (fathers to) all children born in 2010–2015 and follow parental leave use until 2018. We find that the 2013 reform was followed by a considerable increase in the uptake of the father's quota. The proportion of fathers who used no parental leave remained stable, but the reform encouraged some fathers to take longer, independent leave in addition to the birth-related leave. Overall, less educated and low-income fathers were less likely to use any parental leave, and if they took leave, they were more likely to use only the birth-related leave. However, the 2013 reform slightly diminished socioeconomic disparities in the use of the father's quota. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In analysing heterosexual couples' work–family arrangements over time and space, the comparative social policy literature has settled on the framework of the 'male-breadwinner' versus the 'dual-earner' family. Yet, in assuming men in couple-families are (full-time) employed, this framework overlooks another work–family arrangement, which is the 'female-breadwinner' couple. Including female-breadwinner couples matters because of their growing prevalence and, as our analysis shows, greater economic vulnerability. We perform descriptive and regression analyses of Luxembourg Income Study microdata to compare household incomes for female-breadwinner couples and other couple-types across 20 industrialized countries. We then consider how labour earnings and benefit incomes vary for 'pure' breadwinner couples – comprising one wage-earner and one inactive/unemployed partner – according to the gender of the breadwinner. We find that pure female breadwinners have lower average individual earnings than male breadwinners, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and occupational and working-time differences. Furthermore, welfare systems across most countries are not working hard enough to compensate for the female breadwinner earnings penalty, including in social-democratic countries. Once controls are included in our regression models, it never happens that pure female breadwinners have higher disposable household incomes than pure male breadwinners. Thus, our study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that female-breadwinner families sit at the intersection of multiple disadvantages. In turn, these couples offer comparative scholars of the welfare state an 'acid test' case study for how effectively families are protected from social risk. Our results additionally highlight how cross-national differences in the female breadwinner income disadvantage do not fit neatly with established welfare typologies, suggesting that other factors – in particular, labour market characteristics and the economic cycle – are also at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the continuing interest in multi-dimensional approaches to poverty, the article considers ways in which Senian capability indicators can be used to assess and understand poverty and deprivation. More specifically, we develop novel capability data on 29 dimensions for adults from the US, UK and Italy to explore three core research questions. First, we show that when poverty is seen as capability deprivation, different individuals are identified as poor compared with approaches based on low income or subjective wellbeing. However, we also observe that what the poor report being able to do or otherwise is, nonetheless, it is relatively robust to the use of these three different approaches. Second, we employ latent class analysis to identify poverty and deprivation profiles for groups within society and suggest that such profiles help to identify groups who are deprived or socially excluded with respect to some but not all areas of life. Third, and finally, we examine the association between individual capability deprivation and local area deprivation in the UK. We find that individual capabilities are associated with local area deprivation in some cases but that the connections vary significantly depending on the dimension under consideration. We discuss the results and conclude by suggesting that capability indicators can provide insights into poverty which do not emerge from a more traditional approach focusing on income alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long-standing debate in academic and policymaking circles about the normative merits and economic effects of a universal basic income (UBI). However, existing literature does not sufficiently address the question of which factors are associated with individual support for a UBI. While a large literature in political economy has focused on individual preferences for existing welfare state benefits, it has not analysed the case of a UBI. Using the eighth wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), this article seeks to remedy this gap by analysing individual support for a UBI in 21 European countries. The findings from logistic regression analyses with country fixed effects are partly consistent with the expectations of previous social policy and political economy literatures. Younger, low-income, left-leaning individuals and the unemployed are more likely to support a UBI. Individuals with positive views of benefit recipients and/or high trust in political institutions are also more supportive, while anti-immigration attitudes are associated with lower support. By contrast, the patterns across occupations are mixed and male respondents appear slightly more supportive. Trade union membership is not statistically significant, perhaps because of contradictory effects: unions typically support new welfare state policies but they also have a key role in many existing welfare state schemes and may worry about individuals' attachment to the labour market. At the cross-national level, support tends to be higher where benefit activation is more pronounced and unemployment benefits less generous. These results suggest one possible reason why countries with high support for a UBI have not introduced it: the mixed support among the left means a pro-UBI coalition has to draw on right-wing voters who may support it only with lower taxes and/or extensive replacement of welfare state benefits, which in turn may further alienate parts of the left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis and the unequal degree to which it has affected European Union (EU) member states have fuelled the debate on whether the EU should take responsibility for the living standards of European citizens. The current article contributes to this debate by investigating for the first time public support for an EU-wide minimum income benefit scheme. Through an analysis of data from the European Social Survey 2016, our results reveal that diverging national experiences and expectations are crucial in understanding why Europeans are widely divided on the implementation of such a benefit scheme. The analysis shows that (1) welfare state generosity and perceived welfare state performance dampen support, (2) those expecting that 'more Europe' will increase social protection levels are much more supportive, (3) the stronger support for a European minimum income benefit in less generous welfare states is explained by more optimistic expectations about the EU's domestic impact and (4) lower socioeconomic status groups are more supportive of this policy proposal. These findings can be interpreted in terms of sociotropic and egocentric self-interests, and illustrate how (perceived) performance of the national welfare state and expectations about the EU's impact on social protection levels shape support for supranational social policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax expenditures (TEs) are preferential tax treatments granted to specific individuals or categories of households, with the aim of achieving social and economic goals. They are widely used by EU Member States. However, their fiscal and equity impacts are not always clear and their effectiveness and efficiency as a policy instrument need to be carefully evaluated, especially in the present context of constrained public finances. This article quantifies the fiscal and equity effects of social TEs related to housing, education and health in 28 European countries making use of EUROMOD, the EU-wide microsimulation model. We find a variety of effects, in terms of sign and magnitude, across Member States, and within these, among types of households. Overall, our findings suggest that the impact of TE on tax revenues and on income inequalities can be sizable. The redistributive impact of removing TEs can go in both directions, either on the progressive or regressive side, depending on the country and the TE considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that people with disabilities incur additional expenditures on transport, heating, equipment and other items. In this article, we estimate the magnitude of these extra costs of living for adults with disabilities aged 50–65 across 15 countries of Europe using the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. Drawing on the standard of living approach of Zaidi and Burchardt, we compare the incomes required by households with and without adults with disabilities to obtain an equivalent standard of living. We advance upon this research by drawing on the cross-nationally harmonized data of adults aged 50+ from the SHARE. The results suggest that there are substantial extra costs of disability in these countries: around 44 percent of income for a household with an adult reporting a work-related disability and somewhat less than 30 percent of income for a household with an adult who receives disability benefits. Applying an equivalization scale based on these figures increases the overall poverty incidence rate, especially for households with disabled adult members. These findings thus have implications for analysing the entitlement and benefit levels for disability support programmes and for devising accurate poverty estimates concerning persons with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether declining or sluggish growth in earnings for low-wage workers contributes to declining levels of minimum income protections. Starting from the observation of lacklustre growth in minimum income protections, this article introduces a framework to conceptualize the tensions facing modern welfare states in their attempt to (1) provide poverty-alleviating minimum incomes, (2) achieve employment growth and (3) keep spending levels in check. We argue that, due to downward pressure on low gross wages compared to median household incomes, it has become more difficult to balance each of those three objectives. Estimation results from country-year panel data suggest that declines in minimum wages (or low gross wages) are associated with declines in minimum income protections for the jobless. When growth in minimum income protections does exceed growth in low gross wages, we find that welfare states also increase gross-to-net effort to subsidize the net income of low-wage earners. We argue that these findings point towards a 'structural inadequacy' around minimum income protections for the jobless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When studying the relationship between inequality and preferences for redistribution, it is often assumed – either implicitly or explicitly – that individuals are informed about actual levels of inequality. Newer research, however, challenges this assumption and shows that perceived inequality differs from actual inequality. Empirically, these inequality perceptions are rather good predictors for preferences for redistribution. This article argues that individuals answer the standard question for measuring preferences for redistribution based on their inequality perceptions. I conduct a simple regression analysis based on two waves of the ISSP (1999 and 2009) and show that (1) inequality perceptions are systematically linked to socio-economic variables as well as to ideological beliefs rather than to actual inequality. Then, I disaggregate the variance in inequality perceptions to a part which is explainable by socio-economic and ideological determinants (the common control variables for explaining preferences for redistribution) and an unexplained part. I show that (2) the explained as well as the unexplained variance part is associated with preferences for redistribution. I argue that this finding makes considering inequality perceptions practically relevant since standard control variables do not fully account for variation in perceived inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate around a universal basic income (UBI) tends to focus on the economic and social implications of the policy proposal. Less clear, however, are the factors influencing support for a UBI. Using the 2016 European Social Survey, we investigate how trade union membership and left political ideology (central to power resources theory) and attitudes towards immigrants' access to welfare benefits (central to welfare state chauvinism) affect individual support for a UBI. We also investigate how country-level differences in levels of social spending moderate individual-level UBI support. Results from multi-level models suggest that a broader coalition of UBI supporters can generally be found in countries where social spending is low. Specifically, we find that welfare state chauvinism is more likely to be associated with negative attitudes towards a UBI in countries with high levels of spending, but has only a weak association with UBI support in low-spending countries. Similarly, political ideology is more consequential in explaining UBI support in countries with higher levels of spending. These tensions form a demand–capacity paradox: the countries which are presumably least equipped to implement a UBI see the most broad-based support for the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]