Social Investment

Knowledge-based social investment policy for youth

The objective of this working group is to analyse the applicability of the social investment paradigm to youth.
This will

1. map national practices in implementing compensation and investment policy measures
2. explore the opportunities and threats in implementing social investment instruments targeted to enhance the social inclusion of youth
3. investigating policy cases that benefit disproportionally better-off groups
4. understand the balance between universal and context-dependent factors in finding feasible solutions to cross-domain disadvantages of youth.

03/03/2022 at 09:00 to 04/03/2022 at 18:00: Working Group Meeting

The meeting had for objective of working on a paper project about young people’s access to minimum income schemes in Southern Europe. In fact, social citizenship is largely “familialized” in Southern Europe, meaning that young people are considered as children and as result cannot claim for minimum income on their own. Their parents are supposed to take care of them instead. However, many reforms have taken place recently in that matter. In Spain, a national minimum income has been adopted in 2020 but with an age limit at 23. Likewise, in Italy a national minimum income has also been adopted in 2018 but without an official age limit. In France, the minimum income scheme includes an age limit at 25 since 1988, but since the government has recently (in 2022) reformed the youth guarantee scheme so that an activated benefit is now available in theory to low income young people. The question is then: how can we understand these different reforms? Our meeting allowed us to exchange on them and to come up with a structure and a schedule in order to write the paper, which we want to submit to a journal before the summer.