Boosting work through welfare? Individual-level employment outcomes of social investment across European welfare states through the Great Recession

Abstract

Given the heterogeneity of European welfare states, governments’ efforts in ‘social investment’ reform may reap different outcomes in different national contexts. Through multi-level modelling based on longitudinal microdata from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (2004–2013) and on country-level policy indicators, this article assesses: whether citizens of countries that put higher budgetary efforts into social investment have better employment prospects and whether increasing such efforts over time improves employment chances within a country; whether people living in social investment-oriented welfare states maintained higher employment chances in the years of the Great Recession; whether micro-level employment outcomes depend on (in-)complementarities between investment- and protection-oriented policies. The results reveal that the most social investment-oriented welfare states show higher individual-level employment chances, which they were able to preserve during the Great Recession. However, increasing resources on social investments does not always yield empirically discernible returns over the short-to-medium term.

Composite analysis: synthesising cross-national differences in policy case studies

“…Some scholars for instance have attempted to analyse whether childcare services and leave policies (Thévenon, 2016) and childcare services and Active Labour Market Policies (Nieuwenhuis, 2022) impact on female employment when implemented in tandem. Ronchi (2023) has looked at the capacity of Active Labour Market Policies also to mitigate the potential moral hazard predicament attached to out-of-work income protection, improving instead of hindering job search. In this report we do not solve this methodological and empirical challenge but point in the direction of possible ways to study policy complementarities from the perspective of policy design through the lenses of different gaps in social protection.…”

Challenges and Opportunities for the Development of Polish Enterprises in the Face of Crisis Threats

“…While domestic demand has slowed down significantly, a slight rebound is already visible in the activities of domestic customers; the trend related to the international slowdown may last longer and the recovery time may be longer. A strong labor market in Poland and one of the lowest unemployment rates in the entire EU [72,[75][76][77][78] is a good prognosis for overcoming the recession in production and beyond. Further actions aimed at increasing social support are worrying, as they may contribute to another wave of inflation growth.…”