The European Union coordinates and encourages Member State actions to combat poverty, and to reform their social protection systems on the basis of policy exchanges and mutual learning ('best practices'). This paper analyses the effectiveness of welfare state policies and especially social...

Most analyses of social protection are focussed on public arrangements. However, social effort is not restricted to the public domain; all kinds of private arrangements can be substitutes to public programs. OECD-data indicate that accounting for private social benefits has an equalising effect...

In many European and other Western countries, labour markets will continue to be reformed in order to accommodate further adjustments to economic, demographic and socio-ecological developments. Moreover, labour market institutions and other aspects of labour markets receive a lot of attention in...

In most OECD-countries income inequality has increased during the last two decades. In this paper, we investigate whether changes in the overall distribution of income can be attributed to social policy measures. For most (but not all) countries we find a possible relationship between changing...

Prior studies have suggested that higher public pensions are associated with lower income inequality among the elderly, whereas the reverse is true for private pensions. Van Vliet et al. (2012) empirically test whether relative shifts from public to private pension schemes entail higher levels...

The aging of populations and hampering economic growth increase pressure on public finances in many advanced capitalist societies. Consequently, governments have adopted pension reforms in order to relieve pressure on public finances. These reforms have contributed to a relative shift from...

Discussions on how to organize European labour markets are one of the key public policy issues of today. In European policy debates, the most important concepts seem to be ‘flexicurity' and the ‘transitional labour market.' In this report we examine the cross-country variation in the...