Boosting work through welfare? Individual-level employment outcomes of social investment across European welfare states through the Great Recession

Given the heterogeneity of European welfare states, governments’ efforts in ‘social investment’ reform may reap different outcomes in different national contexts. Through multilevel modelling based on longitudinal microdata from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, 2004-2013) and on country-level policy indicators, this article assesses: whether citizens of countries that put higher budgetary efforts into social investment have better employment prospects and whether increasing such efforts over time improves employment chances within a country; whether people living in social investment-oriented welfare states maintained higher employment chances in the years of the Great Recession; whether micro-level employment outcomes depend on (in-)complementarities between investment- and protection-oriented policies. The results reveal that the most social investment-oriented welfare states show higher individual-level employment chances, which were indeed able to preserve during the Great Recession. However, increasing resources on social investments does not always yield empirically discernible returns over the short-to-medium term.