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This chapter provides a broad overview of contemporary minimum-income transfers in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. It starts out by proposing a simple typology for situating different types of minimum-income benefits as elements of the overall redistribution system. The third section summarizes the generosity of benefit payments and the structure of health care-related support measures that complement them. The fourth section describes the limited available comparative data on the number of benefit claimants and considers to what extent they matter when assessing the relevance of social assistance measures as safety nets. The fifth section provides a condensed overview of the “mutual obligations” debate, discussing, in turn, the rationale of back-to-work and other activation measures and the main results from the evaluation literature. The last section concludes by highlighting some challenges for minimum-income programs posed by the recent economic downturn.

This chapter analyses the institutional structure and quantitative development of national minimum income protection (MIP) systems. In this chapter, seventeen countries are studied and each of the countries is presented in a separate section. Each section is organised as follows: the first part studies the role of MIP in the overall social security system from a historical perspective. The second part describes the present welfare state context of the MIP systems on three policy areas: unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and family policies. This second part relates to the comparative analysis of the welfare states presented in the previous chapter. The third part provides an overview of each of the country's MIP systems. This part shows which schemes exist, when they are introduced, who the target groups are, and how these schemes can be generally characterised. For each of the countries, a summary table is presented to illustrate the main components of the MIP system of the particular country. The fourth and final part analyses the development of MIP receipt from 1992 to 2010. For each country, a table that shows the development of the recipient numbers in the main MIP schemes are provided. Included as well are the total and long-term unemployment rates of each country. This approach allows for the explanation of the development of MIP receipt in the context of problem pressures, for which unemployment is a key indicator. Data on the recipients were taken from the EUM in database while data on unemployment were taken from the Eurostat official website.

This chapter identifies the economic, social, and equal opportunity policies that facilitate women's achievement of an acceptable standard of living, or an escape from poverty independent of family relations. Following discussion of policies conducive to this goal of de-familialization, two policies are highlighted: minimum-income guarantees and full employment. After considering economic and political resources for reducing the poverty of women, the discussion compares Sweden and the United States, two study countries that differ widely in social policies and the achievement of de-familialization. Finally, notwithstanding the difficulty of foreseeing the future in a time of crisis, there is an attempt to look ahead.

I argue that if one accepts the four assumptions I outlined above, one must accept the claim that individuals have social rights to adequate minimum income, housing, education, and health care, i.e. rights to these resources, which are necessary for us to lead what everyone would have to agree is a minimally decent life. In arguing for this conclusion, I set out in detail the conceptions of rights, autonomy, and well‐being that underpin my case for the constitutional entrenchment of social rights.

Minimum income schemes have an important role in the overall architecture of social protection systems in Europe and other advanced economies. Commonly known as social assistance or as safety-nets, these schemes provide income protection for those in need and marginalised income groups. They are the most evident expression of societal commitment that all individuals are entitled to a dignified existence and that no one should experience unwanted need. Minimum income schemes are schemes that provide financial safety-nets for people with income below the national social minimum. Because of their subsidiary nature, minimum income schemes are only available for those who are no longer eligible for other forms of income protection. Unlike categorical social assistance, minimum income schemes are universal, hence they are not targeted to particular groups or social risks. And unlike social insurance which provides insurance-based protection against work-related and social risks, minimum income schemes are a non-contributory form of protection. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the minimum income schemes and the provisions of safety-nets across Europe. It examines the convergence and divergence of the provisions of minimum income schemes in countries such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. The chapter also discusses the changes and the transformations that changed the mission and objectives of minimum income schemes in Europe. Among the causal factors are the debates on minimum income schemes across the Atlantic and the rise of unemployment between the 1980s and the 1990s. To fully understand the impact of activation on the role and nature of minimum income schemes, the chapter looks at how this has been implemented. It discusses the meaning of activation, the activation tools, and the activation of minimum income recipients. The chapter ends by outlining the concerns of the succeeding chapters.

This chapter discusses the arguments posed by Philippe Van Parijs and Mead on the issue of the right to minimum income. Their arguments, which typify the fundamental standpoints in the literature, failed to provide an adequate justification of the right to a minimum income. Reflecting on the difficulties faced by Mead and Van Parijs, the chapter argues that a more satisfactory alternative is possible. This alternative can only be successful if it is set in the context of an ontological framework that concentrates on advancing an individual's personal development, but recognises its social bases, and the obligations that this imposes, and encompasses a more significant view of the role of the market as a mechanism of social regulation. Discussed in this chapter are: the right to minimum income in political theory; debate on the right to minimum income theory; Mead, Van Parijs, and the right to income theory; and foundations for an adequate justification of the right to minimum income.

This chapter analyses the minimum income protection (MIP) systems in seventeen European countries from a comparative perspective. The first section examines the MIP benefit levels for adults of working age and their families. This section analyses how the generosity of needs-based social citizenship rights moves away from average incomes and other social benefits. From a comparative perspective, the second section discuses the aggregate MIP recipients across countries for three population groups: the total population, adults at working age and persons at pension age. Analysis of these populations highlights the salience of MIP within the overall welfare state and society. Third section of this chapter discusses the expenditure of MIP which is linked to the number of beneficiaries than to generosity. Even with international differences, MIP spending has the tendency to be modest in terms of the share of national GDP or share of total social spending. The fourth section discusses from a comparative perspective the institutional differentiation of national MIP systems in several categorical schemes. Categorical differentiation within the MIP systems illustrates an important dimension of the institutionalisation of basic social citizenship rights. The fourth and last section offers a summary of the patterns of variation. These chapters show how individual countries can be grouped into different families of nations on the basis of the previously analysed dimensions of MIP.

This chapter compares trends in the means-tested minimum income schemes in the four Nordic countries with those in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK over two decades. The chapter challenges the conventional picture of Nordic minimum-income amounting to a small proportion of the overall income protection provided as being generous and able to alleviate poverty to those who receive it. The study shows that the capacity of minimum-income schemes to protect recipients against poverty has been weakened, because of insufficient upgrading for keeping pace with general increases in earnings.

This chapter provides the methodological framework for the comparative study that is used to validate the hypothesis mentioned in the previous chapter. Following a brief description of the cases under analysis, the chapter then demonstrates that the relation between the employment effectiveness of minimum income schemes and their respect for the right to personal development can be best analysed by combining simple correlational tools, cluster analysis, and the heuristic potential of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).

This chapter uses simple correlational tools, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), and cluster analysis to test and evaluate the hypothesis that minimum income schemes that show more respect for the right to personal development, once labour conditions are accounted for, will present higher levels of employment effectiveness. This chapter concludes that while the results produced by the correlational tools, QCA, and cluster analysis did not confirm the hypothesis advanced earlier, this does not mean that the hypothesis can be refuted. In fact, the empirical analysis shows that, providing there are more restrictions on the recipients to choose other activities instead of paid employment, it is possible to successfully combine a greater respect for their right to personal development with higher levels of employment effectiveness.

Involvement in poverty reduction at the European Union level remains mainly limited to soft governance initiatives, such as the formulation of nonbinding outcome targets and the monitoring of Member States’ progress toward these targets in the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) Social Inclusion and more recently in the revised European Semester. This chapter asks how to give more bite to European social governance and how to further “socialize” the existing Europe 2020 strategy and the European Semester. It argues that binding input governance in the field of minimum income protection is the place to start. As a first step, the chapter proposes augmenting the so-called auxiliary output indicators with relevant input indicators.

This chapter focuses on the employment effectiveness of minimum income schemes. Before discussing the analysis, the chapter first clarifies what is actually meant by employment effectiveness. Activation means a policy of combining negative and positive incentives to aid income support recipients to become self-sufficient through paid employment. This has implications for the measurement of employment effectiveness of minimum income schemes, in particular the treatment of subsidised work, which is deemed unrepresentative of fully self-sufficient forms of existence. In light of this, employment effectiveness, in this chapter, refers to the schemes's ability to place recipients in unsubsidised employment. After examining the schemes's respect for recipients' rights to personal development, the chapter then focuses on their employment effectiveness. It starts by looking at the percentage of minimum income recipients that made a transition to unsubsidised work. It also examines the schemes's marginal employment effectiveness, which is able to adjust the schemes's effectiveness to the existing labour market conditions. In conclusion, when labour market conditions are taken into account, TTK in Finland is the most effective scheme at putting recipients back into the labour market. In contrast, BSHG in Germany, especially after the introduction of the 1998 Social Code, and the RMI in France, are the least effective schemes.

This chapter examines the welfare contexts in which the minimum income protection (MIP) systems are institutionally embedded. Particular focus is given on the social arrangements of three population groups: unemployed persons, single parents and older persons. These groups have the tendency to fall into the last safety net if other social provisions fail to protect them adequately. The chapter ends by providing hypotheses on the role and salience of MIP systems that are derived from these inter-country variations of protectiveness of social security systems.

This chapter reviews the main contributions and discusses how these could be further elaborated in future and additional research. The fist section of this concluding chapter discusses the lessons for policy. Such lessons include the intensification of efforts that should be given to the promotion of the rights of individuals to personal development and the need for the improvement of the employment effectiveness of minimum income schemes. The second section reflects on recent developments in the minimum income schemes. While recent developments were tackled in the previous chapters, there are some details of such advancements that need a closer look. Among these developments are the Hartz IV legislative and the reform of RMG in Portugal to cite a few. The last section of the chapter discusses the possible implications of the results culled in this book to the debate on the reform of social and employment policies in Europe.

Chapter five discusses how CEE countries as new EU member states had to shift from the former residual social safety net to a new “inclusive” approach to anti-poverty measures as advocated by EU institutions. It describes the main challenges that post-communist countries had to deal with in the construction of minimum income schemes and in the adoption of new ideas of social justice, mainly shaped by the condition of need as a main criterion regulating the individual right to state assistance. This chapter also traces the main patterns of poverty in CEE countries until 2008. It shows how during those years CEE countries started diverging significantly in their construction of poverty in accordance with internal priorities and visions underlying the distinction between deserving and non-deserving categories of poor.

Social protection systems traditionally serve a dual purpose: to maintain acquired living standards in the event of social risks and to combat poverty by guaranteeing adequate minimum incomes. More recently, these goals – which are basically instances of damage compensation – have been complemented with a third objective, namely to foster ‘active inclusion’ as a means of preventing or rectifying damage. Starting from the hypothesis that the tensions between these objectives of social protection may have increased the chapter considers changes in poverty reduction by social transfers according to household work-intensity. In order to identify the role of policies it considers trends in spending levels and benefit generosity. It then reflects on the potentials and constraints to achieve more adequate minimum income protection. The most important conclusion to be drawn is the striking – and in many countries rising – inadequacy of social protection for individuals living in households with a low work-intensity.

This chapter explains the hated and widely misunderstood alternative minimum tax. Based upon the early history of the AMT as a tax on people who took advantage of the rules to avoid all of their tax, many taxpayers and politicians view the AMT as a misdirected penalty against middle-income taxpayers. The AMT in its current incarnation does much more than that, however, and this chapter demystifies it by explaining how it works and how it suddenly became a perceived problem in 2003. It then explains why the need for an alternative tax that coexists with the regular tax is an admission of the failure of the income tax.