Aligning Employment Promotion with Poverty Prevention

The Growth of Disability Insurance in Belgium: Determinants and Policy Implications

“…To examine the evolution of the LT DI recipiency rate more closely, In addition to these trends, the Belgian DI program has several well-known features common to most developed countries (Garcia Mandico et al 2022). First, the increase in the DI 56 The employment rates presented in this study are below the official employment rates reported by the EU Labor Force Survey (LFS).…”

“…Disability insurance (DI) has been a crucial safety net for workers facing health shocks that impair their ability to work beyond a certain threshold. Since the end of the 1970s, many countries, including Belgium, have witnessed significant rises in DI expenditures, prompting policymakers to consider and implement various reforms (Low and Pistaferri 2020, Despehande and Lockwood 2022, Garcia Mandico et al 2022. In Belgium, the rise in the DI recipiency rate has recently become a pressing concern, as shown in Figure 1, which compares the country's DI recipiency rate (i.e., the number of DI recipients relative to the population aged 20-64) with other countries that have experienced high DI recipiency rates in the past.…”