In response to structurally poor job prospects for the least skilled, a number of European countries have introduced measures to boost domestic services employment. No country has done so with more fervor than Belgium. Belgian consumers can use the so-called "Service Vouchers" to pay for a...

In response to structurally poor job prospects for the least skilled, a number of European countries have introduced measures to boost domestic services employment. No country has done so with more fervor than Belgium. Belgian consumers can use the so-called "Service Vouchers" to pay for a...

The working poor were long thought of as people toiling away in lousy, under-protected and underpaid jobs in places like fast-food joints, supermarkets, hotels and bars. The perfidious consequence of that perception was that in-work poverty was seen as a non-issue in countries with extensive...

The Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages represents a watershed initiative adding substance to the EU's social dimension. It contains two ambitious objectives: establishing the minimum level of statutory minimum wages (SMWs) at 60% of the gross median wage, and increasing collective bargaining...

Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty, on top of many other benefits, including greatly reduced administrative complexity and cost. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential...

There is a long-standing controversy over the question of whether targeting social transfers towards the bottom part of the income distribution actually enhances or weakens their redistributive impact. Korpi and Palme have influentially claimed that the more we target benefits at the poor, the...

Basic income advocates see a universal income grant, no questions asked, as bringing many potential benefits, not in the least as an ironclad protection against poverty, if set high enough. It is hard to know with any certainty what a world with a sizeable basic income would look like but we can...

There has not been much progress on the poverty front in Europe over recent decades, at least if we take it as a relative phenomenon in affluent societies. There is a lot of pessimism about the possibility of making any real progress at all. Some argue that adequate poverty relief is simply too...

This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area...

Governments across the EU have been striving to get more people into work while at the same time acknowledging that more needs to be done to 'make work pay'. Yet this drive comes at a time when structural economic shifts are putting pressure on wages, especially of less skilled workers. This...