A high level of public services in housing, transport, education and health care is essential for liveability in urban centres, as shown in this report, with the help of European data for large cities. Inhabitants of larger cities, where the housing market is heavily commercialised in terms of...

Minimum income schemes are set to provide citizens with a minimum living standard. In Spain, these schemes consist of a heterogeneous and complex collection of regional benefits designed and implemented by the Autonomous Communities. This generates important regional discrepancies among the...

Minimum income schemes are set to provide citizens with a minimum living standard. In Spain, these schemes consist of a heterogeneous and complex collection of regional benefits designed and implemented by the Autonomous Communities. This generates important regional discrepancies among the...

Social security revenues are influenced by business cycle movements. In order to support the working of automatic stabilizers it would be necessary to calculate social insurance contribution rates independently from the state of the business cycle. This paper investigates whether European...

This article explores how German pension and retirement policy could be made more sustainable, focusing on selected current options for action rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive overview. Before turning to specific problems and perspectives, the article first discusses key...

Official poverty methodologies differ from other poverty measurement methods in the sense that the official ones are more often used as a benchmark to develop new policies as well as to evaluate the performance of existing programs. Europe has the tradition and the practice to use relative...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...

The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changes that have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens with adequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on data for 24 European Union...

Drawing on the analysis in MS9, this paper summarises the policy relevant lessons on what drives and hinders institutional change in services for people with disabilities in EU Member States, and offers some recommendations on how such changes may be facilitated. The focus is mainly on the...

The newest, quadripartite typology of Western European welfare states needs some modifications nowadays. The Nordic and the Southern model have remained intact but the Continental and the Anglo-Saxon types have significantly converged (regardless of the economic crisis) that can be explained...