We evaluate a comprehensive activation program in Norway targeted at hard-to-employ social assistance claimants with reduced work capacity. The program offers a combination of tailored rehabilitation, training and job practice, and a generous, stable, and non-means-tested benefit. Its main aims...

We evaluate a comprehensive activation program in Norway targeted at hard-to-employ social assistance claimants with reduced work capacity. The program offers a combination of tailored rehabilitation, training and job practice, and a generous, stable, and non-means-tested benefit. Its main aims...

This paper analyses the extent to which the Italian welfare system provides monetary compensation for those who lost their earnings due to the lockdown imposed by the government in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. In assessing first-order effects of the businesses...

In Belgium, a series of social security reforms have been implemented over the years with the overarching goal of increasing the labor force participation through better work incentives. Using individual-level administrative data, the paper studies the impact of those incentive-based reforms on...

Poverty alleviation is an important objective of European countries and of the United States. If these ‘rich' states offer elaborate systems of income maintenance, why is there still a considerable amount of poverty? And why are anti-poverty outcomes so different in the United States compared...

Policy-makers have confronted welfare dependence and poverty among single mothers by imposing work requirements and time limits on the receipt of welfare benefits. Reforms with such features have generally reduced programme case-loads and increased the employment and earnings of single mothers....

The paper evaluates the distributional effects on earnings and income of requiring young welfare recipients to fulfill conditions related to work and activation. It exploits within-social insurance office variation in policy arising from a geographically staggered reform in Norway. The reform...

This paper assesses Italy’s 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD’s Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that...

Die Grünen wollen Hartz IV durch ein garantiertes Einkommen ersetzen, das höher ist als das derzeitige Arbeitslosengeld II und nach Einkommen, Vermögen und Bedarf gewährt wird, ansonsten aber bedingungslos und ohne Sanktionen ist. Aktive Beschäftigungspolitik und Mindesteinkommenspolitik...

The present Social Security program has been shown to be financially unsustainable in the future without modification to the current program. The purpose of this paper, the Employee Benefit Research Institute's fourth in a series on Social Security reform, is threefold: to illustrate new...