The concept of social investment in social policy design has gained progressive traction in scholarly debates and policy-making environments from the mid-1990s onwards. Building on the pioneering work of the Dutch Presidency of the European Union (EU) in 1997, calling attention to 'social policy as a productive factor', social investment ideas became foundational for the Lisbon Agenda, launched in 2000, with the ambition to turn Europe into the 'most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth and more and better jobs and greater social cohesion' (European Council, 2000). It is generally recognized that European welfare states have, with varying degrees of success, upgraded their social investment impetus the most in the decade before the onslaught of the global financial crisis (Bonoli, 2013; Hemerijck, 2013). Alongside retrenchments, there have been deliberate attempts to rebuild social programs and institutions and thereby accommodate welfare policy repertoires to the new economic and social realities of the knowledge-based economy in times of adverse demography. The most recent assertive embrace of social investment came with the launch of the Social Investment Package for Growth and Social Cohesion (henceforth SIP), by the European Commission in February 2013, urging EU Member States to advance post-crisis welfare reform strategies that help 'prepare' individuals, families and societies to respond to the new risks of a competitive knowledge economy, rather than pursue policies that simply 'repair' damages after moments of economic or personal crisis (EC, 2013). Like any notion of 'investment', the concept of social investment connotes the possibility of measurable 'returns on investment' or a social investment 'discount rate'. Fundamental to social investment returns is the importance of composite or synergy effects of complementary policy interventions, supported by social security safety nets under variegated economic and socio-demographic conditions, and relating to diverse aspects of wellbeing: human-capital development, income maintenance and protection, and the facilitation of gendered life course and labour market transitions. Moreover, optimal gains in social investment synergy effect require the effective management of 'institutional complementarities' between social protection, human capital development, and employment regulation. Any measurement of social investment's 'returns', therefore, requires attention to these complexities. Assessing Social Investment Synergies (ASIS) does precisely that, by developing an evidence-based methodology for analysing the financial, economic and societal returns of social investment policies. This involves setting up the tools to measure the implications of the social-investment approach to social policy, as compared to traditional compensatory social protection arrangements. This involves studying effects of the provision of 'capacitating' policies such as education and training, active labour market policy, and child and elder care, which equip and assist people to surmount the increasingly uncertain-and thus less insurable in an actuarial sense -hazards of the labour market and the life course. The focus of this study is to explore in detail the positive and negative effects of such social-investment-related social policies in terms of economic wellbeing broadly understood in term of employment, GDP growth, labour productivity, gender equality, and (relative) poverty. Although social investment is often positively related to economic growth, social investment policy innovation is certainly not singularly related to higher levels of economic growth. There is wide spectrum of (complementary) policy interventions related to economic growth, ranging from technological progress, trade liberalization, the deepening of the single market, higher public investments by EU member state with large current account surpluses, and so on and so forth. Social investment is no 'growth miracle'.
