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.

This chapter investigates the relationship between poverty trends and employment, proceeding in two steps. The first step explores the link between individual employment and household employment. A ‘polarization index’ is defined in terms of the difference between, on the one hand, the actual share of individuals living in jobless households and, on the other, the hypothetical share of individuals living in jobless households assuming that individual employment is distributed randomly across households. The second step integrates the link that is so established between individual employment rates and household employment with an analysis of the relationship between household employment and poverty. An integrated decomposition of changes in the at-risk-of-poverty rates is presented on the basis of (i) changes in the poverty risks of jobless households, (ii) changes in the poverty risks of other (non-jobless) households, (iii) changes in household joblessness due to changes in individual employment rates and changing household structures and (iv) changes in polarization.

Some scholars argue that intra-EU labour migration improves the allocation of human capital in Europe and that labour mobility is still too low to constitute a single European labour market. Others insist that free movement of labour and services makes employment more precarious and causes wage dumping. Less attention has been given to the origins, destinations and nature of flows of posted workers, partly because data on posting are scarce. We aim to fill this gap by exploring unique posting data for Belgium. We argue that while the free movement of labour and a single European labour market have been policy goals for decades, it is the free movement of services that is shaping a hybrid single European labour market, since high levels of short-term service mobility are more significant than long-term labour migration. This is as much a phenomenon of intra-EU15 mobility as of post-accession mobility, and is set to remain more prevalent than classic free movement of labour.

Over the last 30 years the share of individuals in the Belgian working-age population without employment ('individual joblessness') has fallen continuously, while the share of households with no working-age member in employment ('household joblessness') remained fairly stable. In this paper we examine why individual joblessness and household joblessness diverge.The growing gap between both measures of joblessness reflects changes in household composition and changes in the distribution of individual employment over households. We describe the latter phenomenon by constructing a measure of 'polarisation of employment over households', which is based on the difference between observed and 'expected' household joblessness. On the basis of changes in household formation and changes in individual joblessness one would have expected household joblessness in Belgium to decrease. However, increasing polarisation, i.e. an increasingly unequal distribution of jobs over households, has counteracted this 'expected' evolution.Singles constitute households that are most vulnerable to the polarisation we describe, but a shift towards such more vulnerable households offers only a small share of the explanation of the evolution over time. We observe rising levels of polarisation, both in single adult households and couples. Within these household groups, changes in polarisation are similar, but increasing polarisation among couples is the most important factor in the overall increase in polarisation.

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