Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous...

Previous OECD reports have concluded that disability policy has changed substantially in many OECD countries in recent decades. Nevertheless, large employment gaps remain between people with a disability and those without. This paper builds on earlier OECD analysis and recent extensions to...

Although Australia’s labour market escaped the dramatic negative impact of the global financial economic crisis seen in other OECD countries, a substantial share of working-age Australians either did were not working or worked only to a limited extent as the global recovery gathered pace...

Means-tested Social Assistance (SA) benefits play an important role as social protection floors sup-porting households in financial difficulties. This paper presents evidence on the patterns of SA benefit re-ceipt in a selection of OECD and EU countries. It provides an overview of the role of SA...

The OECD regularly produces estimates of tax burdens and benefit entitlements for a range of “typical household” situations. The results of these calculations (published in the Benefits and Wages and Taxing Wages series) are frequently used to compare countries’ tax-benefit systems and to...

For a number of reasons, incomes vary strongly with age. The nature of this variation is of interest for a wide range of policy purposes. Since age structures differ across countries, knowledge about the incomes earned by different age groups is also necessary for understanding and interpreting...

Finding a suitable balance of work and family life is not an easy task for parents who face multiple, and potentially conflicting, demands. Childcare policies play a crucial role in helping parents reconcile care and employment-related tasks. But inconsistent or poorly implemented policies can...

This paper presents results from an on-going joint European Commission / OECD project, aimed at monitoring the direct influence of tax and benefit instruments on household incomes. The project uses and extends OECD tax-benefit models to compute a range of work incentive indicators such as...

The non take-up of social assistance benefits due to claim costs may seriously limit the anti-poverty effect of these programs. Yet, available evidence is fragmented and mostly relies on interview-based data, potentially biased by misreporting and measurement errors on both benefit entitlement...

Cash benefit programmes have increasingly emphasised conditionality and "demanding" forms of activation in recent decades. Behavioural requirements are now a key element in reforms of unemployment benefits (UB) and related out-of-work benefits in high-income OECD countries, and they are the...