Suchergebnisse

In this article we critically assess the social investment perspective that has become the dominant paradigm in European social policymaking. We identify and discuss some of its shortcomings that may hamper social progress for all. In doing so, we focus on three pillars central to the idea of social investment: social inclusion through work, individual responsibility and human capital investment. We find that the social investment perspective has some serious flaws when it comes to the social protection of vulnerable groups. This is strongly related to the continuing relevance of social class in explaining and remedying social inequalities. We conclude that investment cannot be the only rationale for welfare state intervention and that protecting people should remain equally high on the policy agenda.

In the last few decades, measures to reconcile work and family life have risen in mutual interaction with a rising rate of dual earnership. However, dual earnership has (to date) been adopted in a socially uneven way in most European societies. Therefore, one may wonder whether the activation measures have brought about a loss of vertical redistribution in welfare states. We address this question by focusing on the interaction of three measures of family policy and their overall distributional effect in Europe, with the Belgian region of Flanders as the case in point. We develop a fine-grained analysis to reveal the budgetary impact of the variation in use and generosity, and find that today in Flanders the redistributive effect of child benefits is largely undone by subsidized childcare and parental leave benefits. If parents' employment is to be generalized, this case study suggests that more attention is required regarding the universal use of reconciliation measures.