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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]

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]

Persisting high poverty and social exclusion rates remain a key challenge of European welfare states. The socio-economic consequences following the COVID-19 crisis are challenging the protection of social citizenship and social rights of the most vulnerable. We examine the role of the European Union (EU) in supporting the most vulnerable citizens by focusing on the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD). Our key question is, if and in which ways the EU strengthens social citizenship and social rights through FEAD. We base our analysis on a document analysis of the Regulation, Member States' operational programmes and results of a survey with food aid organizations in Belgium, Lithuania and Portugal. Our findings suggest that FEAD represents a contradictory case of European action in the field of social citizenship and social rights. On the one hand, FEAD is a highly targeted social policy instrument. On the other hand, food aid, as the main provided instrument, is based on charity and not on social rights. Accompanying social inclusion measures could support beneficiaries in the take-up of social rights, but these measures lack clear rules for implementation and monitoring. We conclude that FEAD seems to contribute to the institutionalization of charitable food aid within national welfare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Seen as an alternative to precarious, informal work or no job at all, several European countries have started to use tax money to boost the demand for domestic services. This article asks whether this makes sense. We consider the case of the heavily subsidized and highly popular service voucher scheme in Belgium. Close to a quarter of households there employ domestic service workers under the scheme, making it in relative terms the largest scheme of its kind in Europe. The workers employed under the scheme enjoy extensive labour and social security rights. Does the service voucher scheme provide a model to be followed if we care about labour market exclusion and precariousness or is this a case of institutionalized second-tier work? To that end we trace workers' labour market pathways over a considerable length of time. We find that a substantial share of women find a way out of vulnerable labour market situations through the scheme. However, a very significant number enter from steady employment. This is clearly at odds with the original objective of offering a stepping stone to women with a precarious labour market position. The scheme also plays an ambivalent role in the labour market integration process of immigrant newcomers. At least in part, the Belgian scheme can be seen as a case of policy overshooting. We suggest some potential improvements. [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]

In order to alleviate child poverty, contemporary European welfare states have shifted their focus increasingly towards child-centred investment strategies. However, studies examining the generosity of welfare states to families with children focus mainly on cash benefit packages, or on government expenditure, while not taking into account the actual out-of-pocket costs families have to make to fulfil their needs. This article aims at contributing to existing studies by: (1) empirically assessing the needs and costs of children across welfare states by making use of cross-nationally comparable reference budgets, while taking into account publicly provided or subsidised services; (2) simulating the cash benefits and taxes that affect households with children through the tax–benefit system, by making use of the new Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT) in EUROMOD; and (3) combining both types of information in order to compare the essential out-of-pocket costs for children between 6 and 18 years old with the simulated cash benefit packages. We propose a new indicator that can be used to assess welfare state generosity to families with children: the child cost compensation indicator. The use of the indicator is empirically illustrated by comparing six European welfare states: Belgium, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Spain. The article shows that, even though with important cross-national variation, cash transfers generally amount to less than 60 percent of the cost of children. Although in five out of six countries support for families is higher at the lower end of the income distribution, for households living on a low gross wage, the income of a family with children is less adequate compared to a similar childless family and is in many cases insufficient to participate adequately in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to liberal nationalists, sharing a national identity offers a solution to the growing concern that increasing diversity within Western societies might erode solidarity. Based on the national identity framework, a positive relation between peoples' support for redistribution and their national identification is expected. Partially confirmed among majority group members, the aim of this study is to broaden the perspective and investigate the redistributive attitudes of people with a migration background. Since the social identification of people with a migration background is more complex and tends to be based on belonging to both the nation of residence and a specific ethnic group, we additionally consider the role of ethnic identification. We perform multivariate analyses on data from the Belgian Ethnic Minorities Election Study 2014 (BEMES), a survey conducted among Belgians of Turkish and Moroccan descent. The results confirm our hypothesis about the positive role of national identification. Ethnic identification, on the contrary, is negatively related to support for redistribution and particularly the combination of a low attachment to the country of residence and strong attachment to the country of origin is associated with lower levels of support for redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts contemporary debates about the relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state in historical perspective. Relying on new historical data, the article examines the relationship between immigration policy and social policy in Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the modern welfare state emerged. Germany already had comparably strict immigration policies when the German Empire introduced the world's first national social insurances in the 1880s. Denmark, another early social-policy adopter, also pursued restrictive immigration policies early on. Almost all other countries in Western Europe started out with more liberal immigration policies than Germany's and Denmark's, but then adopted more restrictive immigration policies and more generous social policies concurrently. There are two exceptions, Belgium and Italy, which are discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Commission, as well as national governments and national lobby groups, have actively promoted the extension of the domestic service sector since the 1990s in response to the prospect of structurally sluggish employment growth among the least skilled and the perceived need for more social investment. The Belgian service voucher scheme, the most heavily subsidized scheme of this type in the European context, yielded growing numbers of domestic service employees, users and employing companies since its enactment in January 2004. The purpose of this study is to identify whether this scheme was successful in increasing employment rates among low-skilled women in Belgium and to assess whether its employment effects have extended beyond this group of women and affected the employment rates of medium-skilled and highly skilled women. Using time-series analyses and difference-in-differences models for the period ranging from the first quarter of 1999 until the second quarter of 2014, our results demonstrate that the scheme had both short-term and long-term positive effects on employment rates of low-skilled women. However, a reversal in their employment rates during the economic recession is also found, which brought their employment rates to a nadir in 2008. We further found that the scheme's impact extended beyond the employments of low-skilled women to positively affect the employment rates of the highly skilled women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the effects of the European Social Fund (ESF) on domestic activation policies in the three Belgian regions: Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. We argue that over the last decade the ESF has had a catalytic impact, first on the innovation of activation instruments, second on the governance of employment policies and third on policy framing. We explain how three different mechanisms (leverage, conditionality and learning) generate these effects and how they can account for a differential influence in different regions. We conclude by summarizing our research findings and framework, suggesting its usefulness for analyzing other domestic settings and European policy instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]