The Effects of the Recent Economic Crisis on SocialProtection and Labour Market Arrangements acrossSocio-Economic Groups

The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact onnational labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also variedgreatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurancebenefits and minimum income support, working time flexibility and wage setting played acrucial role in determining to what extent the economic crisis led to higher unemployment,wage cuts or income losses and rising poverty. As the crisis gained momentum, the action ofautomatic stabilisation mechanisms built into the national tax-benefit and social protectionsystems was accompanied by heterogeneous sets of discretionary policy measures. Whilethese factors can explain cross-country variation in labour market developments, they alsolead to an unequal distribution of economic risks associated with the crisis across socioeconomicgroups. The present paper aims to investigate and assess to what extent thefinancial and economic crisis that hit the global economy in 2008-2009 impacted these labourmarket developments and to what extent different socio-economic groups were affected....