Documents Guillén, Ana Marta 4 results

"The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has brought occupational health and safety (OHS) to the fore, turning the leading role of the EU in this respect into a peremptory and pressing concern. The authors of this Opinion Paper argue in favour of moving beyond the current fragmented approach to OHS and placing it squarely in the field of social protection. This will allow for a holistic prevention and health promotion strategy, addressing old and new workplace hazards and overall wellbeing. Objectives to be reached should also include age-and gender-specific targeting, clearer legal and policy provisions, availability of research evidence, and enhanced monitoring of compliance with regulations."

"This article investigates the transformative potential of the Next Generation EU (NG-EU) initiative in social protection taking South European (SE) countries as a test case. It starts with a brief examination of the main social parameters of the EPSR and how these intertwine with the NG-EU strategy that links recovery from the pandemic with the EU's long-term green and digital transition objectives. This is followed by a comparative overview of the SE countries' social, green and digital outlook when embarking upon the recovery path. In light of these, the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) of the four countries are scrutinised vis-à-vis the NG-EU specified priority flagship areas. The political background of the plans, the impact of the EPSR on their policy options, and their recalibration potential are comparatively analysed. In setting the course for a twin transition, all four plans share a focus on addressing long-standing social challenges mainly by bolstering productive welfare measures. But path-dependent differences in policy mixes and varying policy integration can weigh significantly on outcomes."

"This article asks whether the novel EU approach to member states' economic adjustment strategies constitutes a ‘social investment turn' by the Italian and Spanish welfare states. The analytical framework combines insights from different strands of the literature on policy change, in particular those devoted to policy legacies and to policy-making ‘conditionings' (constraints and facilitators). The study assesses the extent of social investment, as advocated by EU country-specific recommendations, of the set of measures introduced to fight the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and of programmatic documents issued by the Italian and Spanish executives, such as the State Budget Laws for 2021 and National Recovery and Resilience Plans. In order to evaluate the impact of new conditionality on policy outputs, the article then turns to consider the economic, social and policy legacies of the previous economic crisis and what would have been the prospects for a social investment turn in the absence of Next Generation EU funding. Conclusions show that, at least at the level of intentions, ‘carrots' seem to be working better than ‘sticks' on the quest for more intense social investment in Italy and Spain."