By way of introduction This report provides the fi rm foundation for anchoring the research that will be performed by the GINI project. It subsequently considers the fi elds covered by each of the main work packages: ● inequalities of income, wealth and education, ● social impacts, ●...

Welfare states are said to have evolved over the course of the past twenty years towards a ‘social investment’ model of welfare, characterised by a focus on equality of opportunity and upward social mobility combined with greater emphasis on individual responsibility. More or less...

Introduction In the decade leading to the present crisis – despite years of growing employment and increasing average incomes – Europe did not succeed in making any substantial progress in combating relative income poverty, particularly among the working age population. Certainly, Europeans...

This working paper explores how the poverty reduction capacity of social security evolved in the ‘booming’ years leading up to the current economic crisis. The question to arise is whether and, if so, why social protection provides an explanation for, on the one hand, disappointing poverty...

Welfare states are said to have evolved over the course of the past twenty years towards a ‘social investment’ model of welfare, characterised by a focus on equality of opportunity and upward social mobility combined with greater emphasis on individual responsibility. More or less...

This paper investigates how social class shapes the occurrence of social risks, defined as socio-economic circumstances associated with significant losses of income. The motivation for this exploration derives from the ‘individualisation thesis’, which calls into question the structuring...

The present paper argues that we are witnessing an increase of the tensions between the three main goals of social security systems (poverty alleviation, securing living standards and prevention) and that, as a consequence, the poverty-reducing capacity of social transfers has come under...

This paper provides a description of activation efforts directed towards minimum income recipients. Information on activation strategies aimed at this population group has remained relatively limited, partly because social assistance claimants have only quite recently become a target group of...

*Introduction* The period since the mid-1990s has been a highly interesting one for the Netherlands and important questions can be asked about the role of wages and wage bargaining.1 First, after creating a furore in the 1990s the Dutch Miracle quickly lost its shine in the new century as...