Targeting Benefits and Unemployed: Eligibility criteria in social/public assistance benefits to enable Third-country nationals' transition to work - presented at the Conference - 6th Biennial Conference on Migration and Integration Research in Austria
Abstrakt
This paper analyses eligibility criteria in the realm of employment-related public assistance under targeting benefits to enable young third country immigrant's transition to work in Austria, Finland and Czech Republic. Existing research pointed to the scale of industrialized democracies fiscal imbalances and demographic necessities that confront policymakers under severe pressure to shift social benefits from universalism to selective targeting benefits that emphasize the dispense of benefits based on income-test with a greater proportion to the poor, but targeting based on income- test often leads to withdrawal of benefits as income rises.
Although there seems to exist some common understanding that targeting benefits face equity and efficiency problems, there is still little research in CEE, Western European, and Nordic countries explaining eligibility criteria under targeting benefit in employment-related public assistance to understand young third-country immigrants transition to work. Based on a qualitative cross-national case-oriented research approach with fewer- country comparison, official documents, published and unpublished scholastic texts are collected and analysed by means of a document and content analysis technique to fill in this gap.
The findings show age, behavioural requirement and functional impairment regulative tools, are a major perceived influence in the comparative countries' last-resort safety nets administrative governance to shrink the categories of people eligible for social benefits with a lack of equity, efficiency, transparency and solidarity that may impair equity and efficiency in social benefits allocation when looking at issues such as employment-related transition of young third country immigrants and socio-economically disadvantaged groups in targeting benefit setting. However, the comparative entities determination of benefits level differs in Austria (regional), Finland (national), and Czechia (national) institutional setting ramification.
The outcome points to public liberalism and the new paternalism approach of the government supervising and reproducing moralise behaviour in times of austere redistributive politics fracturing