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DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2010.00765.

x Int J Soc Welfare 2012: 21: 1325

I N T E R NAT I O NA L J O U R NA L O F SOCIAL WELFARE


ISSN 1369-6866

Comparing unemployment protection and social assistance in 14 European countries. Four worlds of protection for people of working age
ijsw_765 13..25

Pfeifer, M. Comparing unemployment protection and social assistance in 14 European countries. Four worlds of protection for people of working age This article aims to show which policy responses 14 Western European countries have adopted to deal with rising unemployment levels and increased need for benets during working age. In contrast to earlier studies, both components of unemployment benets (UB), i.e. unemployment insurance and unemployment assistance, were taken into account in a social rights indicator that depicts the legal entitlements of the unemployed. In total, there were eight indicators of both UB and social assistance representing expenditure, generosity, problem pressure and benet entitlements. The following cluster analysis groups countries using these indicators. The resulting typology consisted of four ways of protecting the working-aged: an extensive safety nets type operating well with functioning labour markets; a liberal protection type dealing with low levels of unemployment; a targeted protection type combined with an insideroutsider divide on the labour market; and lastly, a patchy safety nets type facing high unemployment levels.

Michaela Pfeifer
University of Siegen, Germany

Key words: unemployment benets, social assistance, cluster analysis, typology, comparative, EU-14 Michaela Pfeifer, Fachbereich 1/Soziologie, Adolf-Reichwein-Strae 2, D-57068 Siegen, Germany E-mail: pfeifer@soziologie.uni-siegen.de Accepted for publication October 1, 2010

Introduction Unemployment is a major source of income insecurity. This can be particularly important in times of economic downturn, as large parts of the population are at greater risk of unemployment. Therefore, the systems insuring against the unemployment risk are central to providing income smoothing over short and long periods of unemployment, and this cash provision has the potential to prevent poverty and increased inequality (see e.g. Bckmann, 2005; Castles, 2008). Persisting unemployment may eventually lead to the receipt of social assistance (SA). Whether it comes to that depends on individual factors such as wealth and family structure (Saarela, 2004); moreover, the setup of the systems initially dealing with unemployment, i.e. unemployment insurance (UI) and, in some countries, unemployment assistance (UA), is decisive (Nelson, 2003; Palme, Nelson, Sjberg & Minas, 2009). UI, UA and SA should, therefore, be treated as a system of communicating vessels. We need to analyse the relation

of these programmes to one another to evaluate which policy response is prevalent and how a rising need for benets during working age is dealt with. The analysis is restricted to 14 old member states of the European Union (EU), as at the time of writing not all data necessary to include Eastern Europe in the analysis were available.1 In comparative research, usually UI is primarily investigated (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1990; Palme et al., 2009; Scruggs & Allan, 2006a). There are also comprehensive comparative studies available on SA (e.g. Cantillon, van Mechelen & Schulte, 2008; Eardley, Bradshaw, Ditch, Gough & Whiteford, 1996; Gough, 2001; Ldemel & Schulte, 1993; Nelson, 2010). The seminal study by Eardley et al. (1996), with a later re-analysis of the data by Gough (2001), provided important insights into the details of SA programmes with regard to extent, generosity and eligibility criteria such as the means test. While these studies have brought forward detailed knowledge about the nature of SA in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Int J Soc Welfare 2012: 21: 1325 2010 The Author(s) International Journal of Social Welfare 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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Development (OECD) world, they analysed only the parts of the provisions relevant to the (long-term) unemployed. To evaluate how the countries under study organise income protection for the working-aged and whether there are structural similarities between them, we need to simultaneously analyse the rights and benets that UI, UA and SA grant. This study aimed to do precisely that. A second purpose of the analysis was to present earlier approaches to classifying unemployment protection and develop them further. The following section therefore discusses the existing literature in more detail. The most important aspects of these systems were extracted from this literature review and indicators were developed to cover these dimensions. In contrast to other studies, both social rights indicators as well as indicators of standardised expenditure (e.g. Castles, 2008; Khner, 2007) and data on the problems that countries face at the time of analysis (third section) were used to depict the generosity of systems. The fourth section describes the resulting data matrix for 14 old member states of the European Union (EU) and the results of a cluster analysis. The last section discusses the results in relation to the existing typologies of unemployment benets (UB) and SA presented earlier. A conict between increasing needs and permanent austerity Social protection systems providing benets to the working-age population have become more important
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The analysis is restricted to 14 old EU member states, as at the time of writing not all data necessary to include Eastern Europe in the analysis were available. The possibility to analyse Eastern European social security systems has improved much in recent years. Especially for the four Visegrd countries of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, data on unemployment levels and spending on unemployment benets are readily available from the OECD. Social rights indicators, with their various components such as net replacement rates, duration and qualication period, have also been calculated at least for some years (see Palme et al., 2009 with their calculations for 2005). Moreover, in the framework of the project SPEC: Social Policies in East and Central European Countries (SPEC, 2009), data on unemployment benets, including recipiency rates, are being gathered for the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia (see also Ferrarini & Sjberg, 2010). Similarly, for data on social assistance schemes, Nelsons SaMiP Database (e.g. Nelson 2007, 2010) includes data for all member states of the European Union. The EUmin Database at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research will include data on both SA spending and beneciaries for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. As these data were not yet available at the time of writing, the present study included only 14 Western European countries. Future research on UB and SA schemes, however, should exploit the full wealth of existing data on Eastern European countries, starting with the inclusion of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

since the oil crises of the 1970s. While unemployment was much less prevalent in the rst decades after World War II, the oil crises marked the beginning of a lasting period with lower growth rates, large-scale restructuring of industrial economies and increasing globalisation, all of which resulted in higher structural unemployment (Huber & Stephens, 2001). Despite shrinking leverage for redistribution, the number of those in need of compensation has risen, although to varying degrees in different countries. It is precisely this setting of permanent austerity (Pierson, 1996) in which UB and SA operate: there is the least leverage to nance benets when they most urgently need to be paid (Brusentsev & Vroman, 2007). Usually, either contributions from those in work or general taxation nance UB and SA benets, and, in times of unemployment, this system faces an unfortunate numerical relation between those paying for the benets and those in need. It is thus likely that these schemes lack funding. From this budgetary point of view, cutbacks in times of economic crisis are one possible response to the situation, as the existing means need to be divided among a greater number of claimants. Another reaction might be the Keynesian approach in which UB and SA are used as devices to stabilise domestic consumption (Palme et al., 2009). Given the dynamics of public opinion and the dimension of need, the rst policy response is highly unlikely during an economic crisis, as it would be hugely unpopular (e.g. Fraile & Ferrer, 2005; Howell & Rehm, 2009), and debt nancing may therefore prove to be an additional source for funding the benets. Once the crisis has been overcome, however, politicians are likely to seek benet cutbacks, both as a means to repay debt as well as to avoid similar deadlocks in the future. Elites may also press for reforms to enhance competitiveness and lower costs connected to the support of the unemployed and poor (see e.g. Heiskala & Hmlinen, 2007, for the development in Finland after the crisis of the 1990s). The following section presents the approaches of earlier typologies with regard to UB and SA benets and sheds light on which policy responses have been adopted throughout Western Europe. Earlier studies Prior studies, which either touched on programmes for the unemployed and poor (e.g. Castles, 2008; Esping-Andersen, 1990; Scruggs & Allan, 2006a, 2006b) or focused solely on them (e.g. Eardley et al., 1996; European Commission, 2006; Gallie & Paugam, 2000; Gough, 2001), form a useful point of departure for the analysis at hand in which all three programmes of working-age protection namely UI, UA and SA were investigated.

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Int J Soc Welfare 2012: 21: 1325 2010 The Author(s) International Journal of Social Welfare 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

Comparing unemployment protection and social assistance

Esping-Andersens The Three Worlds (1990) analysed several dimensions of the welfare state, but the work is probably most widely known for the decommodication index, which was replicated by Scruggs and Allan (2006a). The index used detailed institutional information, such as benet generosity, duration, qualication periods, waiting days and coverage rates of pensions, sickness and UB, to depict the degree of market independence that the welfare state grants to beneciaries of these programmes. This prototypical example for the social rights approach relied on programme characteristics instead of expenditure gures to evaluate the generosity of social protection. The strong focus on social rights indicators was due to the presumably treacherous grounds of analyses of social expenditure, which used to rely on the highly aggregated gure of total social spending during the 1980s. This measure does not provide much insight into which groups are specically supported by the welfare state and which are potentially neglected. An often-cited example of the misleading nature of the measure is social spending in Britain during Thatchers time; expenditure rose due to high unemployment levels although benets had been curtailed (e.g. Castles, 2008; Khner, 2007; for a comprehensive analysis of the impact of benet generosity and need on UB spending, see Kangas & Palme, 2007). Recently, however, Castles (2002, 2004, 2008) has advocated the use of disaggregated spending data from the OECD Social Expenditure Database (SOCX) (OECD, 2010). His analyses of welfare state spending on old-age cash benets, working-age cash benets, health services and spending on other services allowed him to identify the priorities of different welfare states and to group countries accordingly (Castles, 2008). Gallie and Paugam (2000) focused specically on UB with the aim of capturing those aspects of the schemes that governed the experience of unemployment in 12 European countries. The authors used recipiency rates, the share of means-tested and nonmeans-tested benets for the unemployed, benet levels and the spending on active labour market policies to classify countries. In their view, differences in these areas lead to a different dynamic within each national culture (Gallie & Paugam, 2000: 3), as many of these indicators have a direct impact on the material situation of the unemployed and the stigmatisation that unemployment brings. The Employment in Europe 2006 study by the European Commission (2006) took into account the policies that lead to labour market exicurity and strengthen employability, such as the average tax wedge on work income representing incentive structures and distortions set by the tax system, the prevalence of participation in lifelong learning programmes, the

strictness of employment-protection legislation and, lastly, spending on all labour market policies. With regard to SA, a comprehensive study of the scheme in OECD countries was published in 1996 (Eardley et al., 1996; for a re-analysis of the data, see Gough, 2001). This study analysed many dimensions of SA, among them benet generosity, eligibility, entitlement criteria such as resource units, the strictness of means tests, administrative questions and also data on spending and recipients. More recently, several analyses have appeared that compared benet rates of SA for a number of European and OECD countries. These analyses also investigated the development of benets over time up to the late 2000s, which is arguably one of the most important aspects of SA and largely determines the material situation of benet recipients. The results of these studies raised concerns about both the adequacy of benet levels with regard to poverty prevention and the erosion of benet levels, especially in relation to wages (Cantillon et al., 2008; Nelson, 2003, 2008, 2010). This brief review shows that the goals of earlier studies differed to an extent from the aim of the study at hand, especially since these previous studies aimed to depict either UI or SA benets, or emphasised aspects such as activation and exicurity policies, but did not take into account the interplay between UI, UA and SA. To achieve a depiction of the whole array of benets intended to protect the working-aged and provide income smoothing in case of unemployment, indicators that picture the connection between UI, UA and SA need to be used. The following section proposes a set of indicators that capture these aspects of UB and SA systems. The indicators take into account social rights data in the Esping-Andersen tradition on UI, UA, SA, expenditure, problem pressure and, lastly, the accessibility of benets. Based on these indicators, 14 European UB and SA systems were classied using cluster analysis. The aim of this exercise was to point out which countries adopted similar strategies of protecting the working-age population. Indicators of UB and SA Social rights indicators Social rights indicators depicting benet generosity have been used extensively since Esping-Andersens (1990) analysis, and there are accordingly several sources available for them (for UI benets, see e.g. Korpi & Palme, 2008; OECD, 2007; Scruggs, 2004; for SA benets, see Nelson, 2007, 2010). For UI, the prototypical decommodication index (Esping-Andersen, 1990) consisted of the benet net replacement rate (NRR), which is the net benet in relation to the net average production worker wage, the qualication 15

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period required for access to benets, waiting days and the duration of the benet. The standardised sum of these components was then weighted by the coverage rate of UI (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Bckmanns (2005) study investigated how much three of these components, namely UI replacement rates, UI duration and UI coverage, contributed to explaining differences in poverty rates both among and within countries over time. Bckmanns analyses showed that the country differences in poverty rates were mainly explained by the UI replacement rates and the duration of the UI benet, while UI coverage was of lesser importance. As these two former indicators are central to poverty prevention, they form the core of the social rights indicators presented here. The UB generosity index used consists of the product of the UI replacement rate and the duration of the UI benet, to which the product of UA replacement rate and the duration of the UA benet was added if the UA replacement rate differed substantially from the SA replacement rate (for details on data sources and index construction, see Table 2). The generosity of SA was captured separately in NRRs and the gures were taken from the SaMIP (The Social Assistance and Minimum Income Protection Interim Dataset). The generosity of SA was captured separately in NRRs and the gures were taken from the SaMIP constructed in a multiyear and ongoing effort by Nelson (2007, 2010). Expenditure on UB and SA Esping-Andersen (1990) criticised measures of total social expenditure in relation to the gross domestic product (GDP) on the grounds that they neither fully captured welfare state generosity nor exactly depicted the degree of redistribution. Today, it is possible to disaggregate total social spending according to its purpose by using the SOCX (OECD, 2010). There is a category that allows us to isolate spending on unemployment compensation and severance pay. For SA, the SOCX database has a broad miscellaneous category which does not fully allow for the relation of the expenditure data to SA programmes. Therefore, data from a preliminary version of the EUmin Database developed in a project on Social Assistance in Europe: Indicators of Minimum Income Security Schemes at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research were used on both expenditure on SA and recipients of these benets. Despite the possibilities that the disaggregation of expenditure brings, it still remains important to view indicators of spending on UB and SA against the backdrop of their components: The indicators depend rst on the generosity of benets and second on the number of people supported (Brusentsev & Vroman, 2007). The degree to which UB and SA benets burden the budget 16

is the product of both components. For the relation between UB and SA spending, the duration of insurance benets is also important: The longer the duration of UB, based on accrued rights, i.e. UI and UA, the higher the spending on UB in relation to SA is likely to be. In countries with a short duration of UI and UA benets, the unemployed are likely to resort to SA once they have exhausted their claim (e.g. Saarela, 2004). Whether the unemployed have to rely on UB or SA usually matters with regard to their material circumstances, as UB benets are generally higher than those of SA. Additionally and similarly important, a higher degree of stigma may be attached to the receipt of SA benets (Albrekt Larsen, 2006; see also Gallie & Paugam, 2000). Taken together, the indicators of spending on UB and SA in relation to GDP carry several pieces of relevant information. They express the burden to the public budget for support of the unemployed and poor. This fact is important in evaluating the available leverage for redistribution. Furthermore, the public is likely to be aware of the dimension of spending to some extent; this dimension may thus have an inuence on public opinion. Additionally, these spending indicators depict the balance between benets based on accrued rights and those based on means tests for the unemployed. The stronger the emphasis is on means-tested benets, the more likely the recipients are to experience stigmatisation. Standardisation of expenditure in these two domains is also possible by dividing total UB and SA spending in GDP by either the number of the unemployed or SA recipients, respectively. The resulting generosity ratio (Castles, 2004; see also Clayton & Pontusson, 1998; Khner, 2007) can be converted to absolute spending per hypothetical recipient by multiplying it with the GDP per capita. This indicator shows how generous the benets are on average, even though it needs to be treated with caution. The measure is more a proxy of average spending per recipient than an exact measure, as it is by no means clear that each unemployed person receives a benet. Moreover, in the case of SA, benets often top up household income (Bahle, Pfeifer & Wendt, 2010). Therefore, the average benet rate is likely to be signicantly lower than the maximum benet legally available. Level of need Although unemployment is a cyclical phenomenon with which all European countries have to grapple during economic downturns, some countries have been more continuously successful than others in terms of lower levels of structural (long-term) unemployment (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1999). Of course, unemployment levels are only one side of the coin.

Int J Soc Welfare 2012: 21: 1325 2010 The Author(s) International Journal of Social Welfare 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

Comparing unemployment protection and social assistance


Table 1. Indicators for the comparative analysis of UB and SA systems.
Dimension Indicator Social rights indicators Index of UB generosity; replacement rates of SA in relation to average production worker wage The index captures generosity of both unemployment insurance and assistance benets, taking replacement rates and benet duration into account. Level of need Spending on UB and SA in % of GDP; spending on UB and SA per recipient The monetary input for the protection of the poor and unemployed is related to societal wealth (GDP) and expressed per recipient. Expenditure on UB and SA Recipiency rate as fraction of unemployment rate Accessibility Unemployment rate as a % of active population

Description

The recipiency rate shows which share of the unemployed receives a benet.

The unemployment rate shows the problem pressure with which UB and SA systems have to deal.

GDP, gross domestic product; SA, social assistance; UB, unemployment benets.

They carry information neither on inactivity during working age nor on poverty rates, especially not on poverty rates of those in employment. Still, unemployment rates are one of the most continuously cited gures in both the mass media and political debates, and these rates have maintained a potential inuence on public opinion (Zaller, 1992). Moreover, they are a key driver for spending on working-age cash benets, which mostly consist of UB and SA (Castles, 2008). In addition, unemployment is one factor strongly contributing to income poverty (e.g. Moller, Bradley, Huber, Nielsen & Stephens, 2003; see also de Beer, 2007). Therefore, unemployment levels are used here as an indicator for the need with which UB and SA schemes have to deal. Accessibility of benets In many studies on UI, coverage rates were used as part of an index of social rights (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1990; Fraile & Ferrer, 2005; Scruggs & Allan, 2006a). Coverage rates express what share of the labour force is covered in principle by the UB scheme and entitled to benets; however, nding the relevant information in regard to Spain, Portugal and Greece proved extremely difcult (see also Palme et al., 2009). In order to include information on the UB schemes capability of reaching the unemployed, recipiency rates were used. These rates state which share of the unemployed actually receives benets (Howell & Rehm, 2009). Of course, it is possible that all the unemployed actually receive a benet, but this must not necessarily be the case. Strict access criteria may lead to the receipt of a benet by a small number of the unemployed, while an encompassing denition of unemployment may lead to benet receipt by a larger number than those actually being counted as unemployed according to the denition of the International Labour Organization (entailing less than 1 hour of paid work each week, constant search for work and immediate availability for a new

position; this denition is usually applied to make unemployment rates internationally comparable). Recipiency rates carry information on the degree of inclusiveness of the system. Moreover, highly inclusive systems are likely to be more expensive, whereas those excluding large groups of unemployed are bound to be cheaper (Brusentsev & Vroman, 2007). A gure showing which share of the poor receives SA benets is not available in a comparative perspective. Non-take-up of SA benets may be a major problem for the effectiveness of these schemes in alleviating poverty, and its extent is connected to the degree of stigmatisation attached to these benets, which was estimated to be as high as 50 per cent in Germany and 1025 per cent in Britain at the beginning of the 1990s (Behrendt, 2002). One can therefore assume that the extent of the problem is also considerable in other European countries, but we unfortunately lack reliable data, so this dimension was not included in the set of indicators used here. Table 1 gives an overview of the indicators used in this analysis. Data and analysis The present article depicts the measures available to protect the working-age population in case of job loss and utilises social rights indicators, expenditure on UB and SA in relation both to GDP and standardised for number of recipients, the unemployment rate as an indicator of need and recipiency rates depicting the accessibility of UB (see Table 2). In order to discover similarities among countries, cluster analysis, a method enjoying increasing popularity in comparative welfare-state research, was used (e.g. Gough; 2001; Jensen, 2008; Obinger & Wagschal, 1998; Reibling, 2010; Wendt, 2009). The method lends itself to the issues in this branch of research because it is able to classify units (here, countries) using a multitude of characteristics simultaneously, thereby highlighting elective afnities of certain 17

Int J Soc Welfare 2012: 21: 1325 2010 The Author(s) International Journal of Social Welfare 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

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Table 2. Characteristics of unemployment protection and SA schemes, 19992001.
Int J Soc Welfare 2012: 21: 1325 2010 The Author(s) International Journal of Social Welfare 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

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Unemployment protection UB generosity index Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Ireland Italy The Netherlands Portugal Spain Sweden United Kingdom Range Median Mean SD Coefcient of variation 107.3 100.7 126.5 55.7 107.3 113.9 35.4 18.6 8.5 132.5 86.4 93.9 71.5 5.8 126.7 90.2 76.0 43.9 0.58 Spending on UB in % of GDP 0.86 2.40 1.36 1.76 1.25 1.21 0.40 0.85 0.34 1.34 0.66 2.02 1.31 0.41 2.06 1.16 1.23 0.62 0.54 Spending on UB per recipient in 2000 $ PPPs 6617 8959 8318 4625 3400 4015 652 5162 859 14342 2668 3792 6277 1960 13690 4320 5118 3657 0.71 Unemployment level as % of labour force 3.70 7.33 4.67 9.70 9.23 7.77 11.30 4.67 10.07 2.73 4.20 11.30 5.73 5.43 8.57 6.53 6.99 2.93 0.42 Recipiency rate 1.282 0.895 0.832 1.226 0.960 0.875 0.313 1.728 0.471 1.653 1.217 0.498 0.960 0.563 1.42 0.93 0.96 0.43 0.44

Social assistance (SA) Replacement rate 0.47 0.38 0.54 0.51 0.37 0.48 0.00 0.39 0.35 0.47 0.24 0.27 0.51 0.31 0.54 0.38 0.38 0.14 0.38 Spending on SA in % of GDP 0.07 0.16 0.57 0.33 0.32 0.45 0.00 0.31 0.02 0.88 0.18 0.03 0.37 0.88 0.88 0.31 0.33 0.29 0.89 Spending on SA per recipient in 2,000 $ PPPs 3559 1724 12333 2168 2226 3538 0 6149 339 5553 753 964 4032 6107 12333 2882 3532 3271 0.93

Sources: The information on unemployment benets (UB) generosity is composed of the unemployment insurance (UI) replacement rates, UI duration and UI qualication period taken from Scruggs (2004). Because Greece, Portugal and Spain are not contained in Scruggs dataset, the respective Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Benets and Wages Country Chapters for 2001 were used to gather the relevant information on UI. The same source was also used for unemployment assistance (UA) replacement rates and duration of all countries (OECD, 2001). The index was constructed by adding the product of UI replacement rates and duration to that of UA replacement rates and duration (in countries with UA schemes providing benets above the level of SA). Countries with qualication periods of 1 standard deviation (SD) or more above the mean were penalised with a reduction of generosity by 20 per cent, while countries with 1 SD or more below the mean of qualication periods were rewarded with a 20 per cent increase in generosity. The UB spending in relation to gross domestic product (GDP) is the average of the years 1999, 2000 and 2001 taken from the OECD Social Expenditure Database (OECD, 2010). UB spending per capita was calculated by multiplying UB spending in GDP by real GDP/capita in year 2000 $ purchasing power parities (PPPs) (taken from the OECD) and dividing the resulting gure by 100. The unemployment rates are the average from the years 1999, 2000 and 2001 taken from Eurostat (2010). The recipiency rates stem from Brusentsev and Vroman (2007: 19); the data refer to the period from 2000 to 2004. UB spending per recipient was calculated by dividing UB spending in terms of GDP by the unemployment rate; the resulting UB generosity ratio was then multiplied by GDP per capita. The SA replacement rate was calculated on the basis of data from Nelsons SaMip Database (Nelson, 2007). Spending on SA in GDP stems from a preliminary version of the EUmin Database created in the project Social Assistance in Europe. Indicators of Minimum Income Security Schemes at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research; data on SA recipients was also taken from this database; the calculation of spending per capita and per recipient follows the same rules as for UB.

Comparing unemployment protection and social assistance

GRC ITA PRT AUT IRL GBR NLD DNK ESP BEL FIN SWE FRA DEU

Figure 1. Hierarchical cluster analysis: dendrogram using ward linkage. AUT = Austria, BEL = Belgium, DNK = Denmark, FIN = Finland, FRA = France, DEU = Germany, GRC = Greece, IRL = Ireland, ITA = Italy, NLD = The Netherlands, PRT = Portugal, ESP = Spain, SWE = Sweden, GBR = United Kingdom.

characteristics. The agglomerative hierarchical methods used in this instance maximise the similarity of countries within one cluster while minimising the overlap between different clusters (Everitt, Landau & Leese, 2001). Initially, each country forms a cluster of its own; then, countries are joined in clusters step by step, never changing clusters in the process. This procedure only comes to an end when all countries are united in one cluster and the optimal number of clusters that maximises homogeneity within clusters can be identied by using similarity or distance coefcients (for a similar application, see Wendt, 2009). The data used for the cluster analysis were standardised between 0 and 1 according to the minimum and maximum of the distribution of each variable. This procedure is superior to z-standardisation in cases for which there may be random noise in the data (Milligan & Cooper, 1988). The result of a ward cluster analysis using the squared Euclidean distance measure is presented in Figure 1. Analyses using single, complete, average and weighted average linkage produced almost identical results, with four clusters as the most appropriate solution with regard to homogeneity of clusters. One country, however, proved problematic to classify. The single-linkage algorithm identied the United Kingdom as an outlier. All the average-linkage procedures placed the United Kingdom in the same group as Greece and Italy. This grouping, however, seems highly problematic. While the three countries are similar with regard to the comparatively low level of UB provision, Greece and Italy have either no or a very patchy SA scheme, while the United Kingdom has a very extensive programme. Moreover, the United Kingdom is not strongly committed to securing living standards, which can be seen in the extremely low generosity of the pure UB benet. Keeping this caveat in mind, the

dendrogram depicting the results of the ward cluster analysis was used, which places the United Kingdom together with Portugal, Austria and Ireland, a somewhat more appropriate grouping. The cluster averages in Table 3 were calculated both including and excluding the United Kingdom. The ward analysis yielded the following cluster solution. Cluster 1 consists of The Netherlands and Denmark, both of which are characterised by low unemployment levels and highly generous benets at both the UB and SA levels. Despite the good situation in the labour market, they still spend large amounts on UB and SA, and these are also reected in the high levels of spending per recipient in both branches. The recipiency rate is above 1 and thus comparatively high in both countries, indicating that these countries apply an encompassing denition of unemployment. Cluster 2 is made up of Austria, Ireland and Portugal. These countries enjoy comparatively low levels of unemployment. With regard to generosity, they display medium levels on average, despite a large range of generosity in this cluster. Their spending is also medium across all measures, and their recipiency rate is well above 1, almost as high as in cluster 1. Cluster 3 consists of Belgium, Germany, Spain, Finland, France and Sweden. In this group, unemployment is at medium to high levels, especially compared with clusters 1 and 2. The countries provide benets of medium to high generosity and target them comparatively strictly towards those fully unemployed, as their average recipiency rate is slightly below 1. These countries spending on UB is the highest of all four clusters. Despite their medium to high replacement rate at SA level, the actual benet paid out to recipients is rather low. This may point to the use of SA benets as a top-up to income from work. Cluster 4 consists of Greece and Italy. This cluster faces severe problems with two-digit gures of unemployment. The UB provided are inadequate, accessible only to a fraction of those unemployed for a relatively short period of time. Greece does not have a last safety net in the form of SA, and Italy has a regionalised scheme with low benet levels and low spending. Both countries prove to be low spenders in all dimensions. These four types are only partly congruent with those shown in other studies, suggesting that welfare regime types do not entirely describe in which way UB and SA are provided. There were several different countries which ended up in different clusters than one would have anticipated from other studies (see the concluding section below). Portugal and Spain were not grouped together with Greece and Italy, but instead surfaced in a cluster oriented towards basic income protection or traditional Continental UB. Similarly, Sweden and Finland did not form one group 19

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L2 dissimilarity measure 1 2

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Notes: a As the United Kingdom was identied as an outlier but placed closest to cluster 2, the averages were calculated with and without the United Kingdom. The gures in squared brackets include Great Britain. GDP, gross domestic product; PPP, purchasing power parity; UB, unemployment benets. AUT = Austria, BEL = Belgium, DNK = Denmark, FIN = Finland, FRA = France, DEU = Germany, GRC = Greece, IRL = Ireland, ITA = Italy, NLD = The Netherlands, PRT = Portugal, ESP = Spain, SWE = Sweden, GBR = United Kingdom, SARR = social assistance replacement rate.

Medium percentage of Medium (3,487) GDP (0.19) [0.36] [4,142]

High replacement rate High percentage of (0.51%) GDP (0.725%)

Medium percentage of Medium to low GDP (0.28) (2,442)

of high protection with The Netherlands and Denmark, but were instead numbered among the Continental countries due to their lower levels of benet generosity, especially in UB. The United Kingdom could not be included in any group due to its specic constellation of low levels of UB and an extensive SA scheme. Discussion and conclusions Depicting European UB and SA systems with indicators of expenditure, generosity, problem pressure and social rights yielded a classication that partly corresponds to earlier typologies. We found Scandinaviantype welfare states with very generous provision and relatively high spending in both areas (Denmark and The Netherlands), and we also identied a core group of two southern European countries with scarce benets and extremely low spending (Italy and Greece). There were, however, several differences between the classication at hand and earlier typologies. Some of them were built mainly on social rights indicators, including information on levels and inclusiveness of benets, while others additionally used extent, expenditure and detailed institutional information on various programme characteristics (for an overview of typologies, see Table 4). Esping-Andersens (1990) hallmark analysis from a social rights perspective built on three dimensions, i.e. decommodication, stratication and the publicprivate mix of three different social security programmes, namely pensions, sickness cash benets and UB. Only the decommodication dimension was applied to UB, and the resulting index included replacement rates, duration, qualication period, waiting days and coverage around 1980. The index scores for UB identied The Netherlands as the most generous country and Italy as one of the least generous countries (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Although the latter study used data from 1980 and did not include SA, there is an overlap between the typology developed here and Esping-Andersens, which speaks for considerable stability at the top and bottom of the distribution and also for a close relationship between UB and SA. The other eight European countries, however, formed a relatively indistinct group with comparatively similar scores, with Belgium being the most generous and France being the least generous country within this medium group. In Scruggs and Allans (2006a) work replicating Esping-Andersens result, the authors suggested a benet generosity index of their own with a subcomponent of UB generosity. This subcomponent identied the same countries as most and least generous, but for the group scoring most closely to the average generosity, the spread of the index scores was somewhat larger than in

High spending (8,943)

High level of spending High spending (1.3%) (11,330 2,000 $ PPPs)

High level of spending Medium spending (1.66%) (5,178)

Medium to low High recipiency rate Medium level of generosity (70.8) (1.4) [1.2] spending (0.8%) [54.5] [0.7]

High recipiency rate (1.24)

Medium recipiency rate (0.9)

Recipiency rate

Medium generosity (90.5)

High generosity (129.5)

Low level (3.7%)

Cluster 2a AUT, IRL, PRT, [GBR] Low level (4.7%) [4.5%]

Table 3. Description of clusters.

Unemployment rates

Cluster 1 DNK, NLD

Cluster 3 BEL, DEU, ESP, FIN, FRA, SWE

Medium to high level (8.5%)

20

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Cluster 4 GRC, ITA

High level (10.7%) Low generosity (22)

UB generosity

Low recipiency rate (0.39)

Low level of spending (0.37)

UB spending in GDP

Low spending (755) Low replacement rate (0.18)

Medium to low-medium replacement rate (0.37) [0.35]

Medium spending (4,816) [4,102]

Per recipient

Medium to high replacement rate (0.42)

SARR

Low percentage of GDP (0.01)

In GDP

Low spending (170)

Per recipient

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Table 4. Typologies of UB and SA protection systems.


Dimensions Esping-Andersen (1990: 50)/Scruggs and Allans replication results (2006a: 68) in round brackets; Scruggs and Allans results based on their own generosity scores for UB in square brackets. Scruggs and Allan (2006b: 892)/country ranking based on the scores taken directly from Scruggs Comparative Welfare Entitlement Dataset (2004) in brackets Gallie & Paugam (2000) Decommodication of UB Replacement rates Qualication period Waiting days Duration Coverage rate See above Year 1980 Types of UB/SA systems 1. Above-average decommodication 2. Average decommodication Classication of countries 1. NLD (NLD, BEL) [NLD, BEL] 2. BEL, IRL, DNK, DEU, GBR, SWE, AUT, FRA (SWE, DNK, DEU, GBR, IRL, AUT, FRA) [SWE, DNK, DEU, GBR, AUT, IRL, FRA] 3. FIN, ITA (FIN, ITA) [FIN, ITA] 1. BEL, NLD (DNK, NLD) 2. SWE, DNK, ITA, IRL, FIN, DEU, FRA, AUT (SWE, IRL, BEL, FIN, DEU, FRA, GBR) 3. GBR (ITA, AUT) 1. GRC, ITA, PRT, ESP 2. IRL, GBR 3. FRA, BEL, NLD, DEU 4. DNK, SWE 1. AUT, FRA, BEL, DEU 2. ITA [CZE, HUN, PLN, SVK] 3. DNK, FIN, SWE, NLD 4. GRC, ESP, PRT 5. GBR, IRL 1. IRL, GBR 2. AUT 3. BEL, FRA, DEU, ESP, ITA? 4. GRC, PRT 5. DNK, FIN, SWE, NLD? 1. DNK, NLD 2. AUT, PRT, IRL [GBR] 3. FRA, BEL, SWE, FIN, DEU, ESP 4. GRC, ITA

3. Below-average decommodication 2000 1. Above-average decommodication 2. Average decommodication 3. Below-average decommodication

Inclusiveness of UB schemes Emphasis placed on means-testing Generosity Active labour market policy spending Employment-protection legislation Lifelong learning Tax wedge Expenditure on labour market policies

1990s

1. Sub-protective regime 2. Liberal/minimal regime 3. Employment-centred regime 4. The universalistic regime 1. Continental 2. Eastern 3. Nordic 4. Mediterranean 5. Anglo-Saxon 1. Extensive, inclusive, above-average benets 2. Low extent, exclusive, above-average benets 3. Below-average extent, average inclusion/ exclusion, average benets 4. Minimal extent, very exclusive, very low benets 5. Average extent, average inclusion/exclusion, generous benets 1. Extensive protection functioning labour market 2. Liberal protection functioning labour market 3. Targeted protection insider-outsider labour market 4. Patchy safety nets high unemployment

Employment in Europe (2006)

19972003/01 (annual averages)

Comparing unemployment protection and social assistance

Gough (2001, based on Eardley et al., 1996)

SA: Extent Structure Generosity

1992

Types in Four worlds

Social rights indicators Expenditure on UB and SA Expenditure standardised for recipients Recipiency rates

Around 2000

UB, unemployment benets; SA, social assistance. AUT = Austria, BEL = Belgium, DNK = Denmark, FIN = Finland, FRA = France, DEU = Germany, GRC = Greece, IRL = Ireland, ITA = Italy, NLD = The Netherlands, PRT = Portugal, ESP = Spain, SWE = Sweden, GBR = United Kingdom.

21

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Esping-Andersens data. The country ranking differed to some degree for both the closely replicated decommodication indicator and their own UB generosity index (Scruggs & Allan, 2006a: 68). Of course, as Scruggs and Allan (2006a) pointed out, the researchers judgement has a signicant effect on the interpretation of legal regulations, and countries are scored based on these dimensions. A version of Scruggs and Allans benet generosity index, including the UB subcomponent, is also available for the year 2000 (taken from Scruggs Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset, 2004). Again, Italy featured as the least generous country, followed by Austria, while Denmark and The Netherlands seemed the most generous. In this respect, there is some degree of similarity to the typology suggested here, as the extremes are congruent. All in all, the comparison of the different efforts to depict the generosity of UB from a social rights perspective showed that the indicators performed relatively well in identifying the extremes of the distribution, i.e. the most and the least generous countries. Using this approach, researchers have to make individual judgements in order to capture certain programme characteristics. These judgements, however, seem to substantially impact the values that indicators take on closer to the average of the distribution. In this range, the indicators are likely to be very sensitive to sometimes ambiguous decisions, as the variation of the country ranking in the middle of the distribution across different specications and points in time of the decommodication/benet generosity index shows. Moreover, indices of decommodication or generosity depict how the system works in theory, but not in practice, although there may be substantial discrepancies between ambition and reality. Of course, social rights indicators do provide us with a good starting point for analyses of benet generosity. Still, we should, as a rule, use a multitude of indicators to justify far-reaching conclusions instead of basing them on only one measure (see also Khner, 2007). Gallie and Paugams study (2000) did employ several indicators of UB and aimed to depict the experience that the unemployed in 12 European countries were likely to have. The analysis used the dimensions of benet generosity, the relative weight of meanstested to non-means-tested benets in UB, spending on active labour market policies and recipiency rates as a proxy for the inclusiveness of UB. The authors approach is thus conceptually closest to the analysis presented here. The southern European countries formed a subprotective type, while Continental Europe was an employment-centred subgroup. Great Britain and Ireland were classied as minimalist/ liberalist types, while Denmark and Sweden, the only Scandinavian countries in their sample, represented 22

the universalistic type. The data for this study, however, stem from the middle of the 1990s, and we know that the crisis that hit Sweden during the 1990s led to cutbacks in replacement rates of UI in its aftermath (Scruggs, 2006). These institutional changes may partly explain the differences between their results and the results in the present study. Moreover, Gallie and Paugam (2000) also included spending on active labour market policies, another dimension of protection systems for the working-aged, which might be an additional reason for the differences in results between both studies. In the study Employment in Europe by the European Commission (2006), several other important aspects closely associated with a functional labour market received attention. This study used data on employment protection legislation, the tax wedge, spending on labour market policies in general (including active labour market policies) and prevalence in participation in lifelong learning. Once again, the results remind us of the usual suspects, identifying Anglo-Saxon, southern European, Continental and Scandinavian clusters. Italy formed the only exception, as it was grouped with several Eastern European countries. We may therefore assume that these aspects are still closer in line with Esping-Andersens regimes than characteristics more closely related to benet generosity. Goughs (2001) typology was based on data from SA schemes in the OECD in 1992 from the extensive study of Eardley et al. (1996). While no information on UB schemes was included, the analysis was designed to give an encompassing view of SA schemes, using data on benet generosity, the number of beneciaries, the expenditure on the schemes and institutional information rolled into an index of exclusion. This typology based on data from 1992 yielded several clusters that partly correspond to the ones found here. The minimum extent, exclusive, very low benet type, for example, maps onto cluster 4, although Portugal was no longer part of this type as of the year 2000, for the country introduced a national SA scheme in 1996. Belgium, France, Germany and Spain were characterised as having below-average extent, average inclusion/exclusion, average benets, and this cluster partly corresponds to cluster 3 in this analysis. Especially with regard to the Scandinavian cluster in his analysis, however, the differences between the typologies might be due to not only institutional change over time but also to the inclusion of the UB perspective: Sweden and Finland did not provide as generous a UB as Denmark and The Netherlands did around the year 2000, and these two countries were therefore included in cluster 3 with the Continental countries in this analysis, while Gough analysing only SA placed them in an all-Scandinavian group.

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Comparing unemployment protection and social assistance

In addition to shedding new light on existing typologies, the country groupings found in this analysis can be characterised in the following way: (i) Extensive protection functioning labour market type. Countries of this type use extensive protection in case of unemployment, with generous replacement rates over an extended period of time and also a generous provision of SA. These measures help the public to accept high labour market exibility with comparatively low levels of employment protection legislation (OECD, 2006). The recipiency rate above 1 indicates that the denition of unemployment is quite inclusive. Spending levels are high despite the low number of benet recipients. These low unemployment levels ensure that the nancial situation with regard to UB remain manageable. If unemployment were to rise, however, the system would likely experience scal pressure. (ii) Liberal protection functioning labour market type. This type deals with low unemployment levels at the time of analysis, and spending is therefore moderate. Protection levels are moderate to low and are therefore conducive to keeping spending under control. SA provision is similarly medium to low. Should unemployment rise, the cost caused by the support of the unemployed would probably not destabilise the model, but benet levels might be too low to lift recipients out of poverty. (iii) Targeted protection insideroutsider labour market type. This group provides generous protection to the unemployed while at the same time facing severe labour market problems. Unemployment is dened comparatively narrowly, and spending is high due to the great number of those in need of support. SA benets are also comparatively generous and in some countries may be used extensively as a top-up to supplement insufcient income from work. Fiscally, the strategy adopted creates severe strains on the budget, and, as benets tend to be nanced from contributions raised on work income, high unemployment levels may aggravate insideroutsider dynamics in the labour market, with employers resorting to xed-term contracts and small jobs for which no contributions need be paid. (iv) Patchy safety nets high-unemployment type. This cluster suffers from high unemployment levels and has adopted a strategy of patchy provision for the unemployed and poor. While this approach prevents unemployment support from destabilising the public budget, it leaves the unemployed largely to fend for themselves after the exhaustion of

short-lived UB. The complete lack of, or low benets of, SA do not provide an adequate follow-up benet. Therefore, it can be assumed that both the family and the shadow economy play a large role in supporting those out of work who are left without social protection. The typology presented here depicts the situation at the beginning of the 2000s. Institutions do, of course, change, as the comparison to classications for earlier points in time shows. Continuous monitoring of development in these countries over time would enable us to track the evolution of UB and SA, and potentially also to link changes in the overall context of UB and SA with reform proposals, public opinion data and actually enacted measures. Moreover, the inclusion of other countries for example more Anglo-Saxon nations and countries of Central and Eastern Europe or the European Free Trade Area could lead to the formation of further or different types. The challenge the countries under analysis face may vary in extent but is similar in essence: A certain share of the workforce is unable to make a reasonable living from the labour market and needs to be supported from the domestic budget, while the causes for this development lie partly beyond the nation-state. Despite the similarity of this challenge, policy makers should be careful to take into account their specic national context, which is closely linked to public opinion and the scal situation. We also know working-age cash benets to be closely linked to outcomes such as poverty rates (Castles, 2008). SA benets, for example, are by no means automatically able to lift recipients out of poverty; on the contrary, using the 60 per cent poverty line, SA is inadequate in preventing poverty in many countries (Nelson, 2008). Moreover, benets have eroded in relation to wages over time (Castles, 2008). While retrenchment and greater reliance on meanstested benets might be benecial to the budget, these options could cause a deterioration of the social situation in the long term, and it is above all this trade-off that policy makers need to keep in mind. Acknowledgements The research reported here has received nancial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) in the framework of the project Attitudes towards welfare state institutions: new perspectives for the comparative welfare state analysis. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the meeting of the EQUALSOC INCDIS group at the ESRI in Dublin, 1011 November 2009, and at the meeting of the EQUALSOC MIPI group at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, 2527 November 2009. I thank the members of both 23

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groups for the lively and very helpful discussions of this work. Thanks go also to Thomas Bahle and Vanessa Hubl, who did the lion share of work in building up the EUmin Database at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research in a project funded by the Hans-Bckler-Stiftung. I am indebted to Thomas Bahle, Nadine Reibling, Timo Weishaupt, Claus Wendt and an anonymous referee from the IJSW for their useful comments on earlier drafts of the article. Moreover, I thank Regina Jutz, Ryan DeLaney and Pia Schtz for their assistance in the process of data gathering, proofreading and editing this contribution.

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