Is there a trade-off between providing adequate income protection and promoting selfsufficiency in social assistance schemes? On the optimal mix of empowerment, conditonality and sanctioning.

This doctoral research aims to gain insight in the optimal policy mix of conditional measures and enabling policies (directed towards social assistance recipients) in order to promote the transition of social assistance to employment, while ensuring a decent level of protection. By doing so, it will contribute to answering the question of why some countries succeed in combining high minimum income protection levels with high levels of outflow from social assistance dependency and why Belgium is not among them. In other words, the central aim is to find out the role of conditionality in bringing social assistance recipients to work and enabling the social assistance scheme to provide adequate benefits.

Keywords:INCOME PROTECTION, SOCIAL POLICY, TRADE OFF

Disciplines:Applied sociology, Social work, Other sociology and anthropology