This book focuses on the main institutional changes affecting the Social Investment approach as the framework for the European social agenda.
The contributions gathered address these issues from different angles, placing two fundamental issues at the centre of the analysis. The first concerns the promotion of the strategic actions of European institutions and the national governments aimed at making social investment a recovery priority in the Eurozone. The second aims to make the social investment approach compatible not only with a high road to growth, as it is in the Stock-Flow-Buffer scheme, but also with the right to balance market and non-market activities as a universal right linked to a different combination of working and living time.
It will be of interest to all scholars and students of social policy and European politics.
Chapter One – Introduction: Investments and social policies in the years of the crisis
Andrea Ciarini
Chapter Two – The social investment welfare state: what can it achieve?
Colin Crouch
Chapter Three – Minimum income and active labour market policies. The traps of the work-first approaches
Andrea Ciarini, Silvia Girardi and Valeria Pulignano
Chapter Four – Social policies and employment in personal care services. The working poor and services in times of austerity
Andrea Ciarini
Chapter Five – Social investment recovery for a resilient Eurozone
Anton Hemerijck and Stefano Ronchi
Chapter Six – Minimum income and working time in the pluri-active society
Andrea Ciarini and Massimo Paci
Biography
Andrea Ciarini is Associate Professor of Economic Sociology in the Department of Social and Economic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. His research interests concern social policies and welfare systems from a comparative European perspective.