This paper qualifies the role of home-ownership as an income complement for the elderly by taking the institutional context into account. We argue that a strategy of asset-based welfare focused on the promotion of home-ownership is not universally applicable, but depends on how housing and pension provision are organised. Based on the extent of commodification in housing and pensions, we distinguish four types of institutional contexts. We argue that, since relying on housing wealth as a pension essentially boils down to a market-based approach to welfare provision, this strategy is more likely to occur when both housing and pensions are largely commodified, which is only the case in the liberal welfare states. The conclusion of a trade-off between the rate of home-ownership and spending on pensions often referred to in prior work is unlikely to hold universally when differences between housing and pension provision across contexts are taken into account.

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In this chapter the possibilities and limitations of using expenditure data to measure ‘social investment’ are discussed. The analysis of expenditure data is an obvious choice for attempts to identify to what extent governments have adopted the agenda of an ‘activating ‘ and ‘enabling’ welfare state as well as to operationalize policies that can potentially account for cross-national differences in poverty trends. The chapter explores the possibilities and limits of operationalizing social investment policies on the basis of social expenditure data. It is shown that the use of expenditure data to map the skeleton of the social investment state is fraught with conceptual and methodological problems. The chapter comments on the spending data related to old and new social risks that are reported in the Appendix to the book.

Policy‐makers in advanced welfare states have increasingly expressed concerns over large numbers of working‐age people claiming social security support. Accordingly, policies aimed at reducing the level of “benefit dependency” have gained prominence. However, such policies rest on shaky empirical evidence. Systematic collections of national “caseload” data are rare, social security programmes overlap and administrative categories vary over time. The internationally inconsistent treatment of national transfer programmes provides a further challenge for cross‐national comparisons. This article first identifies and discusses several of these problems, and ways in which they may be addressed. It then employs administrative claimant data from six European countries as a way of illustrating trends over time and across countries. The underlying aim is to explore the scientific potential of benefit recipient numbers as an indicator for welfare state change over time and across countries.