EU social policy has generally been limited to the definition of non-binding social outcome targets, a governance model known as 'second order output governance'. However, many EU Member States have failed to make progress in fighting poverty. This begs the question of whether a more performant EU-level involvement in the field of social policy is conceivable. In this paper, we argue that European minimum standards are the place to start, including principles for minimum social security and minimum wages, as i) the European social objectives cannot be attained without guaranteeing adequate incomes to those in and out of work, and ii) social co-ordination should thus go beyond broad outcome goals such as the reduction of the number of households at risk of poverty or social exclusion. We propose to include policy indicators regarding minimum income protection in the recently revised EU monitoring process of the European Semester.
This paper studies eight countries in which the regulation of unemployment benefits and related benefits and the concomitant activation of unemployed individuals has a multitiered architecture. It assesses their experiences and tries to understand possible problems of 'institutional moral hazard' that may emerge in the context of a hypothetical European Unemployment Benefit Scheme. CONTENTS
Spending on cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has declined across the U.S. throughout recent decades. Simultaneously, spending on the federally-funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs has steadily increased. This papers investigates whether retrenchment of TANF assistance has led to increases in the participation and levels of benefit receipt of SNAP and SSI. Applying a differences-in-differences approach on household income data from 1997 to 2015, we find that a $50 policy-induced decline in states' TANF cash assistance allocations leads to an increase of between $17 to $32 per month in federal allocations of SNAP and SSI benefits among single-mother households. From a household income perspective, these findings suggest that increases in SNAP and SSI participation have partially offset the retrenchment in TANF assistance. From a state incentive perspective, we find that state governments have the ability, and even a financial incentive, to shift social assistance caseloads to the federal government.
Involvement in poverty reduction at the European Union level remains mainly limited to soft governance initiatives, such as the formulation of nonbinding outcome targets and the monitoring of Member States’ progress toward these targets in the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) Social Inclusion and more recently in the revised European Semester. This chapter asks how to give more bite to European social governance and how to further “socialize” the existing Europe 2020 strategy and the European Semester. It argues that binding input governance in the field of minimum income protection is the place to start. As a first step, the chapter proposes augmenting the so-called auxiliary output indicators with relevant input indicators.
The system of unemployment insurance (UI) used in the United States has often been cited as a model for Europe. The American model illustrates that it is possible to create and maintain a UI system based on federal-state co-fi nancing that intensifi es during economic crises and thus reinforces protection and stabilisation. Central requirements and conditional funding can improve the aggregate protection and stabilisation capacity of the system. However, the architecture of the US system fi nancially incentivises states to organise retrenchment of their own efforts for UI, which in turn leads to a divergence of benefi t generosity and coverage levels. During the Great Recession, the federal government mitigated these incentives for retrenchment through minimum requirements attached to federal fi nancial intervention. With regards to the European unemployment re-insurance system debate, the US experience implies both positive and encourageing conclusions and cautionary lessons.
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