Minimum income schemes in Europe: is there a trade-off with activation policies?

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Roberto Iacono
• 关键词：Social assistance ; Minimum income protection ; Active labor market policies ; European welfare states
• 刊名：IZA Journal of European Labor Studies
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：December 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：6
• 期：1
• 全文大小：622KB
• 刊物主题：Labor Economics; Population Economics; European Integration;
• 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• ISSN：2193-9012
• 卷排序：6

文摘

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, by employing a macro-level institutional dataset on benefit levels for social assistance (SA) and minimum income protection (MIP) in 22 European countries in the period 1990–2013, I show that the adequacy of income support for low-income inactive individuals in European welfare states has been steadily decreasing since 1994. Second, the paper revisits empirically the hypothesis of a trade-off between the adequacy of out-of-work benefits and the public expenditure on active labor market policies (ALMPs). The empirical results of the fixed effects model show that the trade-off does not appear to be significant in any of the tested specifications. The results are robust to the introduction of a set of conventional controls related to the labor market.