The proposal involves the establishment of 'welfare accounts' for every person in a country. There are to be four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

In a comparative framework, the paper uses a recently observed shift away from cash transfers and towards the provision of rehabilitation services to identify barriers to welfare policy reform. The analysis relies on the assumption that some European welfare regimes have a similar initial...

This paper presents non-take-up rates of benefits from the German Income Support for Job Seekers scheme, called Unemployment Benefit II (Arbeitslosengeld II ). Eligibility to these benefits is simulated by applying a microsimulation model based on data from the Socio-economic Panel for the years...

This paper presents non-take-up rates of benefits from the German Income Support for Job Seekers scheme, called Unemployment Benefit II (Arbeitslosengeld II). Eligibility to these benefits is simulated by applying a microsimulation model based on data from the Socio-economic Panel for the years...

This article presents an analytical overview and defines the essence of the concept “social policy” in the context of its relation to the economy. The author of the article has developed a system of indicators to measure the impact of social policy and proposed a technique for assessing its...

This data set provides data on unemployment benefit schemes in 34 welfare states. The data set updates, extends and modifies Scruggs’ dataset (2005). The current data set includes all 27 member states of the European Union (EU) and 7 non-EU OECD countries for the period 1971-2009. The codebook...

This article explores the post-communist worlds of welfare capitalism in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, including the successor states of the former Soviet Union. It discusses recent developments, whilst offering some additional theoretical reflections on the key factors that have...

This paper assesses the development of the welfare state in the post-1989 Czech Republic, showing how differences from older EU member states can be explained in terms of the heritage of the communist past. The focus is on the immediate post-1989 period which is seen as crucial for shaping the...

We investigate the relative contributions of migrant and native households to welfare states. Using two step Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions that control for selection into benefit take-up, we are able to identify the individual variables contributing to differences in welfare receipt by native...

Many welfare schemes discourage low skilled individuals from working. In the same time, there is widespread support for the welfare state among the highly educated. We suggest a model which explains these seemingly contrasting observations. In our approach, intergenerational social mobility is...