ARE PUBLIC BENEFITS AND THE FAMILY COMPLEMENTARY IN SUPPORTING THE UNEMPLOYED? A COMPARISON BASED ON THE EUROPEAN … (original) (raw)

Family benefits in member states of the European Union: a comparative perspective

2015

The article intends to be a screening of family benefits in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) and to contribute to the research of shared trends with respect to family approach in these countries. Four types of family benefits including eight distinctive categories are analysed: child-benefit, child care allowances, child-raising allowances, and other benefits (birth and adoption grants, allowance for single parents, special allowances for children with disabilities, advance payments for maintenance and other allowances). The paper is based on primary and secondary analysis of 28 sets of national data provided through the European Union's Mutual Information System on Social Protection (MISSOC). Three categories of member states are considered: founder member states of the EU, other “old” member states, and the new Central and Eastern ones. Chronological development of national regulations with impact on family benefits is analysed in connection with the moment of becoming a member state. Various forms of family benefits legislation and their main subjects of interest are further researched. The last part of the article looks at the coverage of family benefits. Seven member states operate in this respect based on regulations adopted before EU accession. Belgium, Finland, and Lithuania have the “most preserved” family regulations per category of member states. The first three topics of family regulations are: child, family, and allowance / benefit. The most frequently provided family benefits are: birth and adoption grants, and special allowance for children with disabilities. All eight family benefits are provided in France, Finland, Hungary, and Slovenia. Only two types of family benefits are available in Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus.

Institutional Individualisation? The Family in European Social Security Institutions

Journal of Social Policy, 2016

Welfare institutions have long been set up in most European countries in ways oriented towards the family as the one basic principle. Reforms in recent times however have fundamentally changed the conception of the social citizen. Yet social rights are still mainly conceptualised in the literature in terms of employee rights, and family elements are often interpreted as a kind of vestige of the traditional welfare-state policies of industrial societies.In this paper we develop a formula for making the weight of the family in social security visible and comparing it through the evaluation of cross-country levels of institutional individualisation. We deliver original theoretical, conceptual and empirical insights into the welfare-institutional order with the aim of furthering the understanding of the current social constitution of European societies. The findings show that there is considerable variation in the degree to which welfare institutions treat the social citizen as an indiv...

Self-Responsibility Readdressed: Shifts in Financial Responsibility for Social Security Between the Public Realm, the Individual, and the Family in Europe

American Behavioral Scientist, 2018

Self-responsibility is a prominent keyword in social policy and in welfare state reforms. The concept of self-responsibility, though, has never been clearly dissected for welfare state analysis. In particular, the debate on the turn toward self-responsibility in welfare states has not been adequately conceptualized, nor has the institutionalization of the family in welfare states been correspondingly analyzed, though all welfare states, to different degrees, apply family-related conditions to social rights. In other words, welfare states have treated individuals with family differently from individuals without family, and this has an impact on the interpretation of the turn toward self-responsibility. In this contribution, we systematically and comparatively analyze welfare state change in the family-related conditions applied to social rights, in order to identify shifts in financial responsibility for social rights from the public realm to either the individual or the family. We a...