Minimum income and active labour market policies: The traps of the work-first approaches

In recent years, anti-poverty policies have been at the centre of profound change. As a result of the crisis and the increased number of working poor, every European country, including most recently Greece and Italy, have deployed a wide variety of policy tools to strengthen this pillar of welfare supply: minimum income schemes, as means-tested income support anti-poverty schemes, tax credits and in-work benefits aimed increasing work incentives for low-income workers and their families, active labour market policies as well as dedicated social services (housing, education, childcare, and healthcare) to facilitate social inclusion. As a consequence of these reforms, all European countries can now rely on an extended social safety net to fight poverty and social exclusion. However, these readjustments were not without trade-offs. In fact, while the number of beneficiaries has been steadily on the rise, means-testing, controls, and work conditionalities have been strongly reinforced with a marked pressure to favour work at any cost, even at the price of precarious or low-paid employment. In this chapter, we focus on these transformations in a selected group of European countries: Germany, France, Denmark, and Italy, representative of different welfare regimes (Continental, Nordic, and Mediterranean) and different traditions of welfare measures against poverty.