As many other affluent welfare states, Belgium experienced no structural decline in relative income poverty among the working-age population during the three decades preceding the pandemic. Since the late-1980s, relative income poverty stagnated or even increased, despite favourable trends such as rising employment rates, growing household incomes, and substantial social spending. This was the case in all the three regions of the country, but particularly so in Brussels and Wallonia. Using a shift-share counterfactual analysis, this study investigates to what extent long-term socio-demographic changes-particularly the rise in single-adult, dual-earner households, and migration-might explain the stagnation in working-age income poverty during a period when welfare states shifted towards activation and social investment. The findings indicate that socio-demographic changes had only a limited theoretical effect on poverty. In Flanders, the growing share of two-earner families compensated for the increase in the share of single and lone parent families. In contrast, this compensatory dynamic was absent in Wallonia, partially explaining the notable rise in working-age relative income poverty in this specific region. Migration had a poverty-increasing effect across all regions, especially in Brussels, where non-nationals increased sharply. Overall, these results suggest that socio-demographic shifts cannot fully account for the stagnation in working-age poverty. The study shows that disappointing poverty trends cannot be explained by demographic developments, and that the link between poverty and tax-benefit models is more complex than often assumed. Therefore, country-level analyses may obscure important subnational variations and lead to misinterpretations in cross-national comparisons.

Background Socioeconomic disadvantage and health conditions may mutually reinforce. Musculoskeletal and mental health conditions are among the leading causes of early labour market exit and together account for around two-thirds of long-term sickness absence resulting in labour market dropout in Norway. Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as an intervention that may help address social determinants of these conditions. Norway may be well-placed to host a trial of UBI effects on health, but context-specific underpinning work is needed before a credible grant application can be made. As a first step, we convened a group of health and UBI researchers to consider what underpinning work is needed and what factors may influence trial design. Methods Health and UBI researchers were invited to attend a conference and workshop, during which a Technology of Participation workshop approach was used to facilitate convergence of opinion on knowledge gaps and recommend research priorities. Results Fourteen researchers attended a workshop in Oslo and found broad convergence of opinion on priorities. Commended underpinning work included research in a Norwegian context to better understand health effects of reductions in benefit income due to sanctions or conditionality ( e.g. through qualitative work or surveys), undertaking a discrete choice experiment to quantify value attributes of desirable components of a future health-focused trial of UBI in Norway ( e.g. through conjoint analysis), and agreeing on a core set of outcome measures ( e.g. within a Delphi study) to commend for use in UBI trials more generally. Conclusions Better understanding the health effects of social benefit sanctions and the values placed on intervention components in a Norwegian context may support a case for doing a health-focused trial of UBI in Norway, and understanding values placed on different intervention components will help inform the design of such a trial. Recommending core outcome sets would facilitate cross-comparisons between trials.

This chapter examines Belgium’s social security system, which is the cornerstone of its welfare state and a key issue in national politics. Representing a very significant share of public expenditures, it has been vital for social corporatism, poverty alleviation, and political stability. Although it has been gradually adapted to shifting social, economic, and demographic conditions, the system has so far largely avoided major reforms. Today, amidst rising public debt, changing political dynamics, and community tensions, it is a focal point of political conflict. Section 1 briefly reviews the history of the system and indicates how it is nowadays structured and financed. Section 2 explores its main components, namely health care, child benefits, pensions, unemployment benefits, incapacity for work, and minimum income, highlighting major developments and challenges. Section 3 addresses broader debates, focusing on key issues that have shaped political and academic discussions over the past two decades. The chapter concludes by reflecting on Belgium’s evolving welfare state.

The European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan sets ambitious targets to be achieved by 2030, including reducing the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion (AROPE) by 15 million and raising the employment rate to 78% among the working‐age population. This article investigates the extent to which employment growth to the level of the 2030 employment rate target can deliver on the EU’s 2030 social target. Departing from key theoretical perspectives, we explore five mediating mechanisms that shape the relationship between employment and poverty, including job distribution across households, job quality, and social protection effectiveness. Our twofold analytical strategy first assesses past trends between employment and poverty indicators and then employs shift‐share and regression‐based simulations to estimate how different employment growth scenarios may affect the active‐age population’s at‐risk‐of‐poverty (AROP(a)) and the total population’s at‐risk‐of‐poverty and social exclusion (AROPE) outcomes by 2030. The analysis confirms that employment growth, though it has a strong effect on poverty, is unlikely to deliver the EU’s poverty reduction target without further policy intervention. The full potential of employment growth to reduce poverty depends on, among other things, the distribution of jobs across households. While the EU has long promoted employment as the cornerstone of social inclusion, this article underscores the limits of such employment‐focused poverty reduction strategies in the absence of supporting institutional configurations. Policy recommendations align with the European Pillar of Social Rights and call for coordinated action across employment, wage setting, and social protection domains.

This introduction to our themed section on social policy responses to the recent cost-of-living crisis spells out this topic and the key issues examined in the section's main contributions before summarising their findings and overall contribution to the literature. More specifically, to frame this themed section, the present Introduction begins with a concise, up-to-date overview of the inflationary crisis that emerged in late 2021 and evolved throughout 2022 and the first half of 2023. It then charts, and reflects upon, the diversity of responses enacted in a variety of countries reflective of different models of welfare provision in Europe and North America.

Reaching the three targets of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) Action Plan is the litmus test for effective EPSR implementation. While the EPSR puts forward a prima facie balance between employment, equal opportunities and social protection, two important questions arise: a) whether and to what extent the resources available at EU level are sufficiently balanced across the different dimensions of the EPSR; and b) which implications this may have for achieving the 2030 poverty target. Analysing the three domains of the EPSR, its Action Plan and the wider EU legal framework of the principles contained in the EPSR, the paper argues that abundant EU resources are available for the areas of equality and employment, but fewer for social inclusion. The empirical evidence on poverty trends over the past decades, however, points to important successes in terms of employment and (gender) equality, but not with respect to social inclusion: a significant increase in employment and defeminisation of poverty have been accompanied by greater precarity for low-skilled men and women. Particularly striking is the rise in the risk of poverty among jobless households, linked with the weakening of the poverty reduction capacity of social protection for this group. Meeting the European social inclusion targets will thus require policies that duly focus on strengthening the framework for social inclusion and social protection.

Policy responses to the inflation crisis in Belgium and the Netherlands show great similarities but also significant differences. In both countries responses were quick and substantial. Measures covered prices more than household incomes while universal, not earmarked measures exceeded selective interventions. However, there were also major differences between the two countries. Because Belgium, unlike the Netherlands, could fall back on the mechanism of automatic indexation of wages and social benefits; it relied more on existing universal policy instruments while in the Netherlands more targeted ad hoc measures were taken which also allowed for innovation in policy making. These different policy paths have their origins in the 1980s when policy models began to diverge and different legacies emerged.

In recent decades, disappointing poverty trends and welfare state limitations in many European countries – including constraints on minimum income benefits – have paved the way for a larger role of the third sector. An interesting but controversial form of third-sector in-kind support is food aid provision. In Europe, food aid is, so far, a non-rights-based practice displaying worrisome discretionary and stigmatizing characteristics. Yet, the phenomenon of food aid in Europe has spread, professionalized, and penetrated the institutions of the welfare state. This raises the question if, how and to what extent food aid plays a role in bypassing structural constraints on minimum income protection. This article applies an exploratory case study approach to estimate the monetary value of food aid in relation to statutory minimum incomes in four EU-countries. We use cross-nationally comparable food reference budgets to price food aid packages in Belgium, Finland, Hungary and Spain. The results show that food aid, although not sufficient to close the at-risk-of-poverty gap, is non-trivial for some European households. In Spain and Belgium food aid packages can reach up to €100 a month (expressing 7% to 11% of respective minimum income benefit levels). Importantly, we perceive (formalized) cooperation and interaction between local welfare agencies and food charities in all countries, suggesting that welfare state actors use non-rights-based food aid for filling gaps in the social safety net. The large between- and within-country variation of the monetary values of food aid packages points, however, to food aid as a problematic discretionary practice.

The cost-of-living crisis that began in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis and the attempted Russian invasion of Ukraine has major implications for social policy. In advanced industrial countries, this is the most dramatic cost-of-living crisis since the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s. In this contribution, we explore the inflation and social policy nexus to identify the nature and sources of inflation, its redistributive and policy implications, and the specific nature of the current cost-of-living crisis compared to two other recent crises: the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on advanced industrial countries and drawing on the available scholarship about these topics, we offer the background necessary to understand the challenges facing welfare states in times of dramatically high inflation. As a way to provide broad context to the present themed section, our discussion stresses the economic, social, and political dynamics shaping social policy adaptation to inflationary pressures.

In this chapter on Belgium, Bea Cantillon, Diana DeGraeve and Natascha Van Mechelen provide an in-depth case study on one of the oldest and most traditional welfare states in Western Europe. For long, Belgium followed the key characteristics of the Continental European welfare state model, in an ideal-typical sense. Cantillon, DeGraeve and Van Mechelen unravel the history and developments of the welfare state system in Belgium, besides the special focus section plunging into the depths of the issue of targeting within universalism, within the realms of the health insurance system. This most detailed empirical analysis carries the reader far into the world of health insurance analysis, which is a must-read for every hungry social policy soul.

Through the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD), the European Union (EU) acts as a 'material supporter' of national welfare states. Remarkably, the European Social Fund Plus, integrating ESF and FEAD, is presented as the main financial instrument to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR). This raises the question of what these levers can do in terms of financial support, especially for Member States with greater social needs. By using the Social Scoreboard indicators that monitor the implementation of the EPSR, we analyse the size and distribution of ESF and FEAD according to Member States' economic capacity, social needs and efforts required to meet the European social goals. We find that the funds benefit relatively more the poorer Member States who also tend to have greater social needs. However, especially for ESF, there are significant deviations from this general pattern. Some countries consistently receive less funding than others with similar levels of social needs, and vice versa. Moreover, if, from the perspective of upward convergence, the budgets are expressed as a percentage of the efforts required to lift all income-poor citizens to the EU-wide at-risk-of-poverty threshold, countries who need to make the greatest efforts receive less funding. These outcomes are partly driven by the funds' allocation rules, which give only little importance to the great social discrepancies between countries. This raises the question whether social needs should be taken more into account in the distribution of the funds.

The Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD) aims at providing food and (non-)material assistance to the most vulnerable European citizens. Linking macro and micro data on the importance of FEAD resources shows, however, a mixed picture of targeting the most deprived: although FEAD budgets accrue more to countries with greater social needs, when the budgets are compared with the number of severely deprived persons, FEAD resources were found to be more than twice as high in Finland than in Hungary. This suggests that FEAD does not differentiate sufficiently across countries to focus on the poorest citizens within the Union. Moreover, a micro-level analysis of how these budgets are spent in a number of selected countries (Belgium, Finland, Hungary and Spain) reveals large between- and within-country variations in the developed FEAD programmes, indicating substantial discretionary leeway for Member States and social organisations to implement FEAD.

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Abstract Much has been written since the publication in 1990 of Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism on the concept of welfare regime as an analytical tool to study policy stability and change in Europe and beyond. As a concept, welfare regime emphasizes both stability over change and divergence between country clusters over convergence. Studying concrete policy instruments rather than spending patterns and focusing on policies introduced to protect workers against the risk of unemployment and the loss of income, this chapter explores potential patterns of convergence and divergence in the social policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in four distinct welfare regimes: the Bismarckian regime, the Nordic regime, the liberal regime, and the Southern European regime. The main conclusions of our analysis are twofold. First, we show that regardless of the regime in which they belong, countries have generally enacted emergency measures to expand and/or supplement existing policy instruments. Second, we show that existing national policy legacies help explain key differences in the design of the policies adopted as a consequence of this imperative.

Social protection in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands share Bismarckian roots. Over time, these welfare states were however in constant flux and incorporated to a greater or lesser extend elements of both the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic models. While the Netherlands has from the beginning deviated from the Bismarckian model, in recent years this welfare state has undergone important reforms that have made it increasingly evolve into a "Bismarck cum Beveridge" model. Germany and Belgium also witnessed a dual transformation, with retrenched earnings-related benefits for long-term unemployed and an increasing number of atypically employed people on the one hand and expanded social security to the so-called "new social risks" on the other. It is against this changing institutional background that we can understand the similarities and differences in the extent to which these three continental welfare states used traditional social insurance systems to buffer the social and economic consequences of confinement. First, all three countries strengthened to varying degrees social protection systems for the active age population. So conceived, the policy responses were a response to the dual transformation of social protection that took place in recent decades without, however, changing its course. Second, the extent to which continental welfare states made use of existing social insurance schemes seems to be related to the extent to which these welfare states have moved in the Anglo-Saxon direction.