Three new major Evidence Reviews for the European Commission are now available
Over the last year or so we have been conducting three major evidence reviews for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. We were given the opportunity to present findings to the EU’s Social Protection Committee, the European Social Policy Network and at a half-day seminar at the European Commission. We are pleased to inform you that these evidence reviews have just been published by the Commission and are free to download.
Creating more Equal Societies - What Works? by Abigail McKnight, Magali Duque and Mark Rucci
The aim of this reviewis to assess the effectiveness of education, wage setting institutions and welfare states in reducing inequality. Education both empowers people and provides them with tradeable skills to secure a decent income – greater equality in individuals’ ability to generate income in the labour market is key to producing more equitable outcomes.
Evidence shows that imbalances in power result in some workers being underpaid while others are overpaid. Collective wage bargaining and minimum wages have proved to be successful in reducing wage inequality.
Curbs on the power oftop executives, power which has allowed them to take an increasing share of the wagebill to the detriment of other workers and form a politically powerful elite, need further development.
Welfare states need to evolve to meet the challenges of ‘new inequalities’ and changing employment landscapes, but are essential now and will continue to be essential in the future to help individuals redistribute income over their own lives as well as between the rich and poor.
Low Pay and in-work poverty: preventative measures and preventative approaches by Abigail McKnight, Kitty Stewart, Sam Mohun Himmelweit and Marco Palillo
The evidence presented in this review highlights the benefits of preventing individuals entering low paid work as they can become trapped in low paid jobs or end up cycle between unemployment and precarious, low quality work. In countries where collective wage bargaining institutions declined or even disappeared in the latter part of the 20th Century, governments have been forced to piece together a number of policies to replace the role they played in creating wage floors and reducing inequality. These include minimum wages and (costly) in-work benefits. Reducing the incidence of low pay also has the benefit of reducing in-work poverty.
However, the review emphasises that an effective anti-poverty strategy requires a portfolio of additional measures as well – not all low paid workers are living in poor households and not all workers living in poor households are low paid.
These additional measures include improving job stability and quality, increasing maternal employment and encouraging greater sharing of paid and unpaid work within the household, and – crucially – supporting families with children through universal child benefits and/or tax credits to lower earning households. The role of the latter is particularly important, both because of the higher incidence of in-work poverty in households with children, and because of the long-term consequences of growing up in poverty for children’s lives and opportunities.
Strength of the Link between Income Support and Activation by Abigail McKnight and Arnaud Vaganay
The integration of the administration of income support claims and public employment services in many countries has had a number of benefits which include cost savings, reinforcement of the link between benefit receipt and the need to find work, and easier access to labour market programmes.
The effectiveness of linking activation with income support receipt depends on the suitability of the activation programme. The review concludes that in the short-term activation programmes that ‘push’ jobseekers into work may appear to be more effective than programmes that invest in the employability of jobseekers.
However, in the longer term there is a greater tendency for jobseekers pushed to take the first available job to cycle between unemployment and precarious forms of employment while programmes that seek to improve the job match and enhance the skills of jobseekers result in better longer term employment outcomes.
