Poverty regimes and MIS in Europa

Over the last decades the economic downturn, the 2007-2008 global financial crisis and more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic have created a series of structural problems in the living conditions and well-being of citizens. Those phenomena have contributed to boost a long-standing trend of increasing poverty and social exclusion in all European countries. In this paper we investigate whether minimum income schemes (MIS) in Europe have been strengthened and become more relevant and under which conditions MIS have been made more conditional in line with a workfare approach. To this purpose, this paper sheds light on the reform trajectories of MIS in seven European countries. In doing so, we observe huge variation in MIS institutional features and policy output between different countries, which is in turn attributed to different structural transformations and political dynamics underpinning MIS reforms.