Reconciling Work and Poverty Reduction

This book examines the link between poverty on the one hand and labour market participation and the distributive capacity of welfare states on the other hand. It focuses on the working-age population and the evolutions in Europe during the ''good economic years'' before the financial crisis. Thebook provides social research in an accessible way. It introduces the reader into the various concepts of measuring poverty and exclusion and discusses data limitations. Obviously we are not the first to observe worrying trends in poverty or inequality. The specific approach in this book may besummarized as follows. First to gain a better understanding of the nexus of labour market participation social redistribution and poverty we focus on the distinction between work-poor and work-rich households. Second we augment a traditional ''pre-post approach'' of the impact of social transferswith regression analysis and policy indicators. Third we refine the common method of measuring the redistributive effect of social expenditure particularly for in-kind benefits . Fourth we give due consideration to concepts and data. Most of the analyses are based on the European Statistics onIncome and Living Conditions (SILC) but when relevant and feasible we include alternative surveys (in the case of Germany SILC and SOEP data) and additional data i.e. administrative expenditure data and indicators that inform directly on policy. Finally we discuss our observations withreference to the employment-centred welfare reforms that were prominent in European countries since the mid-1990s and link the analysis with a broader perspective on the socio-economic demographic and paradigmatic evolutions in contemporary welfare states.