Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

EMU entrance exam has played a critical role for a second generation of national social
pacts in the so-called hard-currency latecomer countries, like Greece, Italy and Portugal 19 .
In the area of labour market policy, in the 1990s, the new objective became maximising
employment rather than inducing labour market exit. The main policy trend here is a shift
from passive financial transfers for those participating in the labour market towards activating
measures in order to reduce dependency rates and increase the tax base. In the process,
we witness notable increases in spending on active labour market policies, mobilizing women,
youth, older workers, less productive workers, based on early intervention, case management
and conditional benefits 20 . Public employment services (PES) in many countries, from the
United Kingdom to Italy, and from Spain to Denmark, have been de-monopolized and
turned into “modern service providers”, capable of effectively and efficiently delivering
specialized services to an ever-growing clientele in outward-looking fashion.
With respect to labour market regulation, several European countries have moved towards
greater acceptance of flexible labour markets on the condition of strong matching social
guarantees. Partial employment deregulation has been accompanied with steps toward
labour market “flexicurity”, based on relaxed job protection but offering strong standards
of social protection. Together with active labour market policies for the unemployed,
flexicurity is intended to help bridge the gap between insiders and outsiders in mature
welfare states and permit more flexible family models and individual life courses, with a
view to preventing long-term dependency on income support 21 . In the 1990s, both the Danes
and the Dutch critically deregulated their labour markets and strengthened job seeking
with a series of active labour market policy measures. Classical measures of job security
for labour insiders have been reformed only at the margin.
Within the sphere of social insurance, we can observe how benefits generosity has been
curtailed: eligibility has become more conditional and increasingly targeted at lower income
groups in the majority of European welfare states 22 . A third general trend – which cuts
across various social protection programs – has been greater “targeting” or “selectivity”
of resources towards those most in need. At the same time, most countries have been
strengthening a basic non-contributory safety net, such as the French RMI. In the course
of the 1990s the “job first” principle has gradually made its way throughout European
(un)employment protection systems 23 . Different strategies, based on national preferences,
have experimented with constraints and opportunities, such as traditional means-testing,
19 Levy (1999); Visser & Hemerijck (1997); Hemerijck & Visser (2003).
20 Clasen (2005).
21 Schmidt (2008).
22 Ferrera & Hemerijck (2003); Van Gerven (2008).
23 Clasen (2005).
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