Sustainable and Inclusive Welfare States: Employment and Poverty Among Immigrants and People with Disabilities in Different Welfare State Regimes

Abstract

In this article, we ask to what extent immigrants and people with disabilities are excluded from labor markets and to what extent they are exposed to poverty in different European welfare state regimes. Our starting points lie in the United Nation’s and European Union’s agendas for sustainable development, in research on welfare regimes, and in the social investment paradigm. We utilize the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to run multilevel random effect models to measure the extent to which there are regime-specific differences in risk of poverty and months out of work. Our results show that within-regime dif-ferences are often larger than between-regime differences. The implementation of the social in-vestment paradigm, emphasizing the role of a decent level of income transfers combined with extensive public services, fortifies the fiscal and social sustainability of the welfare state.