Worlds of last-resort safety nets? A proposed typology of minimum income schemes in Europe

ABSTRACT

Over the past twenty years, minimum income schemes (MIS) have undergone major transformations in their functions and role. From mainly residual instruments that aimed to guarantee minimum income support and to prevent extreme marginality, in most countries they now have an ‘ambiguous’ function of providing income support and favouring social and labour market inclusion. Against this background, this article provides an analytical grid that allows describing the different features of last-resort safety nets across Europe, building on the definition of key main dimensions of variation of MISs in Europe – generosity, eligibility and conditionality requirements, institutional configuration, active inclusion profiles. Then, it introduces a new typology of MIS in Europe, building on a new dataset with data on expenditures and coverage collected from National Statistical Offices.

KEYWORDS:

• Minimum income schemes
• poverty
• activation
• welfare regimes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Elena Granaglia, Michele Raitano, and anonymous reviewers for precious comments and suggestions.

Notes on contributor

Marcello Natili is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Milan and a member of European Social Policy Network. His publications include the volume ‘The politics of minimum income. Explaining path departure and policy reversal in the age of austerity’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and the articles ‘Explaining different trajectories of minimum income schemes: Groups, parties and political exchange in Italy and Spain’, in Journal of European Social Policy, 2018; ‘A federalist’s dilemma: Trade-offs between social legitimacy and budget responsibility in multi-tiered welfare states’ (with G. Bonoli and P. Trein), in Journal of European Social Policy, 2018; ‘Children against Parents? The politics of intergenerational recalibration in Southern Europe’ (with M. Jessoula), forthcoming on Social Policy & Administration; and ‘The Right(s) and minimum income in hard times: Southern and Eastern Europe compared’ (with M. Jessoula, I. Madama and M. Matsaganis), in European Societies, 2018. In 2015 he won the Young Researcher Award of the journal Politiche Sociali/Social Policies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In this article, I adopt a strict definition of MIS that does not cover the entire range of social assistance benefits but only anti-poverty benefit for the working-age population. Here, MISs are thus non-categorical, anti-poverty schemes providing rights-based means-tested income support, that are typically flat-rate and tax financed. Relevantly, this definition of MIS excludes in-work benefits i.e. means-tested benefit specifically targeted to employees, such as the Working Tax Credit in the UK, or means-tested child benefits.

2 In particular, one of the most comprehensive of these studies (Gough et al., 1997), identified five different social assistance clusters in Europe. These are the ‘Welfare states with integrated safety nets’ (Ireland and the United Kingdom), in which MISs are institutionalised at the national level and cover a significant amount of the population; the ‘Dual social assistance’ (Germany, France and Belgium), in which exists a general last resort safety net along with measures to protect specific categories; the ‘Citizenship with residual social assistance’ regime typical of the Scandinavian countries (excluding Norway) and of the Netherlands, in which fully institutionalised MIS have only a residual role; the ‘Rudimentary assistance regime’ (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain), where MISs are provided in a fragmented and uneven manner only at the local level; and, finally, the Discretionary decentralised system (Austria, Norway and Switzerland), in which MISs are discretionary and provided only at the sub-national level.

3 The UK is indeed a peculiar case, as there is more than one programme that can be included in the definition of MIS provided above: the Income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance and the Income Support.

4 Relevantly, Germany would still be included in the ‘High Degree of Inclusiveness’ category also if we exclude the number of recipients (1,264,000) of ALG II that had a job while receiving the benefit in order to allow the comparison with countries where in-work benefits were excluded. In this case, in fact, 137.8% of the severely poor individuals below 65 years old would be covered by the German MIS.

5 Beneficiaries of the so-called RSA Activité, which can be considered an ‘in-work benefit’, are not included here in the calculation of recipients of the MIS in France.