Documents social policy 2 956 results

"This 2017 edition of Benchmarking working Europe focuses on the question 'overcoming cleavages across the EU?'. It analyses in four chapters and with the help of 58 visual graphs latest trends and outcomes of European policies in the areas of macro-economics, wages and collective bargaining, labour markets and, last but not least, social dialogue and workers' participation.
The Benchmarking working Europe 2017 demonstrates that the European Union is experiencing increasing social divergences and underlines the need for new policies that can generate higher living standards for all, based on fair integration and upwards convergence."

"As part of the European Semester, the main pillar of Europe's new economic governance, the Commission puts forward every year the 'country-specific recommendations' (CSRs).

This background analysis provides an overview of the 2016 specific recommendations to the EU Member States in the field of employment and social policies. It also includes a brief 'statistical' comparison between the CSRs for 2016-17 and those presented by the Commission and adopted by the European Council in previous years."

"This paper looks at the difference between the levels and nature of social policy expenditure in northern and northwest European countries and the countries of southern, central, and eastern Europe, and examines the relationship between social investment and state capacity in these country groupings. The authors show that southern and eastern countries have a much greater preference for ‘compensating' rather than ‘capacitating' social policy spending. Furthermore, the state capacity in these countries is lower, which generates less state revenue. Based on these observations they conclude that low state capacity and low state revenue go hand in hand with the preference for capacitating social policies, as these policies involve less delegation and discretion than social investment policies. This paper shows that high state capacity is probably a necessary precondition for effective social investment policies, although some limited alternative paths do exist."

"Behavioural sciences help refine our understanding of human decision-making. Their insights are immensely relevant for policy-making since public intervention works much better when it targets real people rather than imaginary beings assumed to be perfectly rational. Increasingly, governments around the world are keen to rely on those insights for reshaping public interventions in a wide range of policy areas such as energy, health, financial services and data protection. When policy-making meets behavioural sciences, effective and low-cost regulations can emerge in the form of default rules, smart disclosure and simplification requirements. While behaviourally-informed intervention has a huge potential for policymaking, it also attracts legitimacy and practicability concerns. Nudge and the Law takes a European perspective on those issues and explores the legal implications of the emergent phenomenon of behavioural regulation by focusing on the challenges and opportunities it may offer to EU policy-making and beyond."

"Due to behavioral effects triggered by redistributional interventions, it is still an open question whether government policies are able to effectively reduce income inequality. We contribute to this research question by using different country-level data sources to study inequality trends in OECD countries since 1980. We first investigate the development of inequality over time before analyzing the question of whether governments can effectively reduce inequality. Different identication strategies, using fixed effects and instrumental variables models, provide some evidence that governments are capable of reducing income inequality despite countervailing behavioral responses. The effect is stronger for social expenditure policies than for progressive taxation."

"2010 a été une année décisive pour l'Union européenne, et ce pour au moins trois raisons majeures. Tout d'abord, c'est durant cette année que plusieurs pays de l'Union ont commencé à rencontrer des difficultés budgétaires croissantes, tandis que la zone euro était elle-même affectée par une véritable crise de la dette s'étendant bien au-delà du cas très médiatisé de la Grèce. Deuxièmement, l'Union s'est efforcée de réaliser les premières étapes de sa réforme institutionnelle avec l'entrée en vigueur du traité de Lisbonne, le 1er décembre 2009. La troisième raison pour laquelle 2010 a représenté un tournant pour l'Union est que la stratégie décennale de Lisbonne, lancée par le Conseil européen en mars 2000 en tant que cadre pour la coordination des politiques socioéconomiques, est arrivée à son terme en juin 2010, les dirigeants européens ayant adopté la nouvelle stratégie « UE2020 ». Tous ces événements ont eu des répercussions importantes et durables sur la politique sociale tant au niveau national que supranational.
Cette édition 2010 du Bilan social de l'Union européenne examine comment l'UE a affronté les défis liés à la crise budgétaire, à la mise en œuvre du traité de Lisbonne et au lancement de la stratégie UE2020. Cet ouvrage met au jour les risques pour le modèle social européen et pour le projet d'intégration européenne de ces événements, l'état du débat sur la révision du Pacte de stabilité et de croissance, l'impact de la crise économique et financière sur les pensions, la nouvelle feuille de route pour la politique de l'emploi et, plus généralement, les tensions, risques et opportunités liés à l'agenda UE2020.
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