Welfare Regimes and the Experience of Unemployment in Europe

Front Cover
Duncan Gallie, Serge Paugam
OUP Oxford, May 25, 2000 - Political Science - 432 pages
The book is the first major study to examine the implications of differences in welfare regimes for the experience of unemployment in Europe. It is concerned with three central questions about the way such regimes affect the experience of unemployment. The first is how far they protect the quality of life of unemployed people with respect to living standards and the experience of financial hardship. The second is their role in mediating the impact of unemployment on the individual's longer-term position in the labour market, addressing the issue of how far they help to prevent progressive marginalization from the employment structure as a result of motivational change, skill loss or the growth of discriminatory barriers. The third is how far such regimes mediate the impact of unemployment on social integration in the community, for instance with respect to the maintenance (or rupture) of social networks and the degree of psychological distress experienced by the unemployed. The book is the product of a major cross-cultural research programme, funded by the European Union (TSER), bringing together teams from eight countries. The emphasis has been on rigorous comparison rather than the all-too-frequent separate country analyses, which usually provide data which differs in format from one country to another. In addition to a systematic comparison of national data sources, it has been able to make use of a new important data source (the European Community Household Panel) produced by Eurostat which provides directly comparable information for all EU countries. The study shows that institutional and cultural differences have vital implications for the experience of unemployment. While welfare policies affect in an important way the pervasiveness of poverty, it is above all the patterns of family structure and the culture of sociability in a society that affect vulnerability to social isolation. The book concludes by developing a new perspective for understanding the risk of social exclusion.
 

Contents

Change over Time
25
Poverty and Financial Hardship among the Unemployed
47
Unemployment Welfare Regime and Income Packaging
69
The Changing Effects of Social Protection on Poverty
87
Unemployment Gender and Attitudes to Work
109
The Permanent Effects of Labour Market Entry
134
Unemployment and Cumulative Disadvantage
153
Lone Mothers Poverty and Employment
175
United in Employment United in Unemployment?
265
A European Analysis
286
Gender and the Experience of Unemployment
307
Public Attitudes to Unemployment in Different
334
The Social Regulation of Unemployment
351
ECHP
375
Replacement Rates in Europe
381
References
387

Social Capital and Exits from Unemployment
200
Who Exits Unemployment? Institutional Features
218
The Effects of Employment Precarity
243
Index
405
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About the author (2000)

Duncan Gallie is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford. Serge Paugam is a Directeur at the CNRS and a member of the Laboratoire de sociologie quantitative, CREST, INSEE, France.

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