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Labour Market Protection across Space and Time: a Revised Typology and a Taxonomy of Countries’ Trajectories of Change

by Federico Danilo Filetti and Emanuele Ferragina

Over the last decades, labour market protection in high-income countries underwent severe processes of change. Labour market liberalization first unfolded in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1980s and served as a blueprint for reforms successively implemented in Europe since the 1990s. These processes of reform accelerated as a consequence of European integration and the Great Recession in the 2000s. Labour market protection has been predominantly reformed through the deregulation of employment protection, the weakening of collective bargaining institutions and the recalibration of compensatory benefits (i.e., unemployment benefits and minimum income schemes). Contextually, the reception of compensatory benefits has been increasingly conditioned to the participation to active labour market programmes. Moving from this context, our study provides a map of labour market protection generosity and change since the 1990s in 21 high-income countries.

How wealth matters for social policy. Introducing the Journal of European Social Policy special issue on social policy and wealth

by Ive Marx and Brian Nolan

Much of the rapidly growing scholarship on wealth understandably focuses on the top because that is where the bulk of wealth is held. This is true even in countries with comparatively equal income distributions and extensively redistributive welfare states. Yet even if assets are concentrated among the wealthy, they also matter a great deal for people who are less well off. Some people who are identified as poor or financially needy purely on the basis of income have meaningful assets, but many do not. Whether they have any such assets, or stand to inherit them in the future, can make a critical difference.

The 2021 special issue of the Journal of European Social Policy looks at how wealth matters for social policy scholarship. All the articles included in the special issue shed an innovative light on wealth in relation to a range of topics relevant for social policy researchers.

JESP European Social Policy Blog Launched

By Mikko Kuisma, Janine Leschke, Emmanuele Pavolini, and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser

The current coronavirus pandemic provides a “stress test” to the capacity of our welfare states to protect individuals and households from old and new social risks as well as to foster solidarity among EU Member States. The editorial team and the editorial board of JESP have decided that this is a good time for launching the JESP European Social Policy Blog.