Socioeconomic Inequality and Policy.

The relation of targeting to social outcomes is a hot topic in social policy literature. This debate focuses on the relation between targeting and the redistribution achieved by the welfare state. Some argue that welfare provisions should disproportionally benefit lower incomes, efficiently achieving redistribution at a relatively low cost (Goodin & Le Grand, 1987), whereas other scholars have argued for the so-called "paradox of redistribution" (Korpi and Palme, 1998). Welfare states that target less, would achieve better redistributive outcomes, as more universal welfare states garner more support from middle class voters for larger social budgets. In recent years, doubts have risen on whether this paradox still holds (Brady & Bostic, 2015; Marx et al., 2016), re-opening the debate on optimal targeting design and effectiveness. A neglected issue so-far relates to the responsiveness of targeted policies in a context of flexible labour market careers. Over the past decades, atypical labour contracts have become more prevalent (Schoukens, 2020). Qualitative research has shown that this evolution led to highly complex careers at the bottom of the labour market, where vulnerable employees combine different types of contracts and alternate employment and unemployment spells (Hills, 2014; Trlifajová & Hurrle, 2019). In such a context, targeted social policies will have highly varying impacts on experienced hardship depending on the speed with which they react to changed circumstances. The responsiveness and accessibility of targeted policies is not only related to their institutional design, but also to their implementation. To the extent that policy makers aim for tailor-made targeted support, the implementation of targeted social policies may be devolved over different policy levels, often the national and the local level (Kazepov, 2010; De Wilde and Marchal, 2019). In such a context, policy makers at different levels may experience incentives that hamper the poverty reducing effectiveness of targeted social policies (Bonoli and Trein, 2016). In order to asses the potential of targeted benefits as effective social policy measures in a profoundly changed labour market context, it is necessary to take account of the interplay of different design options and their implementation, in terms of responsiveness and poverty-fighting effectiveness. Taken together, this research into the design, implementation and effectiveness of targeted policies, will ultimately feed into an exciting new research agenda on how welfare states as a whole can be adapted to a changed world.

Keywords:SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

Disciplines:Social policy