In the last few decades, measures to reconcile work and family life have risen in mutual interaction with a rising rate of dual earnership. However, dual earnership has (to date) been adopted in a socially uneven way in most European societies. Therefore, one may wonder whether the activation measures have brought about a loss of vertical redistribution in welfare states. We address this question by focusing on the interaction of three measures of family policy and their overall distributional effect in Europe, with the Belgian region of Flanders as the case in point. We develop a fine-grained analysis to reveal the budgetary impact of the variation in use and generosity, and find that today in Flanders the redistributive effect of child benefits is largely undone by subsidized childcare and parental leave benefits. If parents’ employment is to be generalized, this case study suggests that more attention is required regarding the universal use of reconciliation measures.
The main goal of this article is to unravel the social distribution of childcare policies: Who benefits from government investment in public childcare? The analysis complements earlier research on the distribution of social policy outcomes and confronts the growing concern over selectivity. By nature, childcare services tend to be used mainly by people in work, i.e. those in higher income brackets. Concern therefore arises about the consequences of increasing childcare budgets for the overall distribution of the benefits of social policy. This relates to the immediate outcome of social policy (net family income), but also to its increasingly central component: labour market participation. Indeed, if childcare actually benefits 'labour market insiders' only, one may wonder whether it is effective as an instrument activating mothers with young children. In this contribution, we look into the distributional impact of subsidized childcare for two countries (Flanders/Belgium and Sweden) already reaching the Barcelona targets for under 3s and interpret the results in a European perspective. Although both cases report high coverage rates, we find that Sweden and Flanders have different -even opposite -distributional outcomes. Both examples provide us with valuable lessons on the redistributive nature of 'new risk policies' and the effectiveness of childcare as an instrument of labour market activation.
Childcare services are increasingly regarded a major policy lever to combat social inequalities in early life. Yet, it was shown that inequality in the use of childcare services is the norm rather than the exception in European and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. As a result, social inequalities between disadvantaged and advantaged children are likely to be reinforced instead of being narrowed. The aim of this article is to conduct a macro-level analysis exploring which welfare state characteristics are associated with inequality in childcare use. We find that government involvement in the availability, affordability and quality of service provision is related to lower levels of inequality in childcare use. The results also suggest an impact of labour market opportunities and parental leave schemes. The findings contribute to a proper understanding of the institutional mechanisms underlying inequality in childcare service use.
Single mothers are vulnerable to living in poverty. The question of how to safeguard the economic status of single mothers in a context of increasing dual earnership is a crucial one. In the present study we addressed this issue by investigating the impact of child benefits on the poverty risk of single mothers in 15 European countries. We focused in particular on the design of child benefits and investigated whether targeting towards single mothers was associated with better poverty reduction. In doing so, we combined information on statutory child benefit entitlement with an empirical analysis of poverty reduction using survey data. We found that: (i) both spending effort and targeting are important to explain the effectiveness of child benefits in reducing single mother poverty; (ii) targeting is related to higher levels of poverty reduction independent of spending effort; yet (iii) it matters how targeting is done.
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