Gerlinde Verbist

Employment chances and changes of immigrants in Belgium: The impact of citizenship

This article looks at the impact of citizenship acquisition on the labour market position of immigrants in Belgium. Citizenship is open to all immigrants with a sufficient period of legal residence, without any language or integration requirements. In that respect, this study is an important complement to existing studies which have mostly focused on countries with strict acquisition rules. Based on Labour Force Survey data for 2008, this study uses probit regression to estimate the static and dynamic employment probabilities and unemployment risks. We find that citizenship acquisition is associated with better labour market outcomes for non-Western immigrants in general. This effect remains after controlling for years of residence since migration, indicating the existence of a citizenship premium in Belgium.

Publicly-provided Services and the Distribution of Resources

This report looks at the effects on the distribution of household income of those government-provided services that confer a personal benefit to users. While most of the comparative evidence of the size and evolution of income inequalities in OECD countries relies on the concept of household disposable income, integrating the effects of these government services is important for both conceptual and practical reasons: first, as the tax burden levied on households represent a deduction from their disposable income, it is important to account for the services which governments provide... Le present rapport examine les effets sur la distribution du revenu des services assures par les administrations publiques qui conferent des avantages directs aux menages qui en sont beneficiaires. Alors que l’essentiel des donnees comparatives sur l’ampleur et l’evolution des inegalites de revenu dans les pays de l’OCDE se fonde sur le concept de revenu disponible des menages, il est important de prendre en compte les services assures par les administrations publiques pour des raisons aussi bien conceptuelles que pratiques : premierement, parce qu’il est important, etant donne que la charge fiscale imposee aux menages vient en deduction de leur revenu imposable, de tenir compte des services...

Combating In-Work Poverty in Continental Europe: An Investigation Using the Belgian Case

Recent studies find in-work poverty to be a pan-European phenomenon. Yet in-work poverty has come to the fore as a policy issue only recently in most continental European countries. Policies implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably in-work benefit schemes, are much discussed. This article argues that if it comes to preventing and alleviating poverty among workers, both the policy options and constraints facing Continental European policymakers are fundamentally different from those facing Anglo-Saxon policymakers. Consequently, policies that work in one setting cannot be simply emulated elsewhere. We present micro-simulation derived results for Belgium to illustrate some of these points. Policy options discussed and simulated include: higher minimum wages, reductions in employee social security contributions, tax relief for low-paid workers, and the implementation of a stylised version of the British Working Tax Credit. The latter measure has the strongest impact on in-work poverty but in settings where wages are compressed, as in Belgium, a severe trade-off between coverage and budgetary cost presents itself. The article concludes that looking beyond targeted measures to universal benefits and support for employment of carers may be important components of an overall policy package to tackle in-work poverty.

The redistributive effect and progressivity of taxes revisited : an international comparison across the European Union

This article examines inequalities in highbrow cultural participation in 18 countries. It tests whether inequalities in such participation occur because of the status conferred by consumption of high culture, or whether they are more a result of differences in cognitive competencies. Inequalities are represented by respondents’ education. By filtering out the effects of cognitive abilities, measured by a person’s literacy skills, we obtain a net measure of the status motives for cultural behavior. Our analysis demonstrates that the net (i.e., status) effect of education on cultural participation is reduced in societies with greater educational expansion and intergenerational educational mobility. This is in line with the status explanation, which holds that exclusionary boundaries between educational groups become less rigid when there are more high-educated individuals in a society and when these originate more frequently from lower social backgrounds. In contrast, the relation between a person’s cognitive skills and their cultural participation is unaffected by distributional variation in education, as the cognitive theory predicts.

Social protection in health: the need for a transformative dimension

1 Research Centre for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, University of Antwerp, Belgium2 Unit of Health Policy and Financing, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium3 Institute of Public Health, Bangaluru, India4 Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp, Belgium5 Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Can higher employment levels bring down relative income poverty in the EU? Regression-based simulations of the Europe 2020 target

At the European level and in most EU member states, higher employment levels are seen as key to better poverty outcomes. What can we expect the actual impact to be, however? Up until now shift-share analysis has been used to estimate the impact of rising employment on relative income poverty. This method has serious limitations. We propose a more sophisticated simulation model that builds on regression-based estimates of employment probabilities and wages. We use this model to estimate the impact on relative income poverty of moving towards the Europe 2020 target of 75 percent of the working-age population in work. Two sensitivity checks are included: giving priority in job allocation to jobless households and imputing low instead of estimated wages. This article shows that employment growth does not necessarily result in lower relative poverty shares, a result that is largely consistent with observed outcomes over the past decade.

Social redistribution in federalised Belgium

The federalisation of Belgium has led to a fragmentation of competences in the field of social policy. Only social security has remained an exclusive federal responsibility. However, there have been calls for further federalisation in this policy area. The prominence of interregional financial transfers fuels such calls, while its opponents point out that, among other things, federalisation would result in greater poverty and inequality in Wallonia, a Region that is already disadvantaged in economic terms. In this contribution we first outline the territorial organisation of social policy in a federalised Belgium. We then analyse social transfers between Flanders and Wallonia, focusing on their size and determinants. We demonstrate that these transfers have a considerable equalising and anti-poverty effect. Next, we explore the theoretical arguments for and against federalising social policy, supplemented with examples from the Belgian case. We conclude with an overview of the discussion and indicate some future policy directions.

Combating In-Work Poverty in Europe: The Policy Options Assessed

For a long time in-work poverty was not associated with European welfare states. Recently, the topic has gained relevance as welfare state retrenchment and international competition in globalized economies has put increasing pressures on individuals and families. This book provides explanations as to why in-work poverty is high in certain countries and low in others.

Maternal employment: the impact of triple rationing in childcare in Flanders

This paper analyses how maternal labor supply responds to the price and availability of childcare services. It focuses in particular on the childcare market of Flanders, which is characterised by above average childcare use, a wide variety of price schemes and suppliers, and strong government supervision regarding quality. Variation in prices and the degree of rationing of three types of childcare services at the municipal level are used to identify mothers’ labor supply responses. A discrete labor supply model of the Van Soest (1995) type is elaborated to allow for heterogeneity in prices and to distinguish between rationed and non-rationed households. These extensions rest on rationing probabilities that are estimated separately for informal childcare, formal subsidised childcare and formal non-subsidised childcare using partial observability models (Poirier, 1980). The estimates confirm earlier findings for Germany and Italy, indicating only small price effects and relatively large supply effects. This shows that labor supply incentives of expansion of childcare services are also present in a country which has surpassed the EU target of childcare slots for 33% of children below the age of 3 (Belgium, in contrast with Germany and Italy). Moreover, budgetary simulations suggest the expansion to be beneficial to the exchequer. Rising tax and social security benefits following the increase in labor supply largely exceed the costs of expansion.

When Famialism Fails: The Nature and Causes of In-Work Poverty in Belgium

For a long time in-work poverty was not associated with European welfare states. Recently, the topic has gained relevance as welfare state retrenchment and international competition in globalized economies has put increasing pressures on individuals and families. This book provides explanations as to why in-work poverty is high in certain countries and low in others.