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Disproving fears of a future characterized by ‘jobless growth’, the decade prior to the crisis of 2008 was marked by strong net employment gains, even though many countries failed to achieve the employment targets set within the context of the Lisbon Agenda. Still, just prior to the crisis, employment rates had reached historically high levels. Unemployment in many EU Member States was at or below levels observers only a decade earlier deemed impossible to achieve. Yet it also became clear that employment growth in and out of itself did not produce the expected outcomes in terms of poverty reduction and other aspects of social inclusion. Marked increases in employment rates had gone accompanied with rising or stagnant relative poverty rates for the working aged population. Income inequality had mostly increased. The crisis period has been marked by equally if not more dramatic declines in employment in a number of countries. Yet ambitions to put more Europeans to work remain unabashed. First among the headlines targets formulated in the current Europe 2020 strategy is the objective of reaching an employment rate of 75 percent by 2020. Some countries have set even more ambitious national targets within this framework. Thus the idea that employment growth and poverty reduction need to go together remains at the core of the current Europe 2020 Agenda, but there seems to be an implicit recognition now that higher levels of employment may not automatically bring better social inclusion outcomes. The Europe 2020 Agenda also contains clear poverty and social inclusion targets. The European Commission (2010) recently stated that social protection is an additional cornerstone of an effective policy to combat poverty and social exclusion in Europe, complementing the effects of growth and employment. The European Commission (2013) has also launched a ‘Social Investment Package’ emphasizing human capital investment. This paper asks how a better marriage between employment participation and poverty reduction could be achieved. The paper starts with a sketch of current debates. The paper continues with a review and interpretation of past trends; why is it that employment growth has not brought lower poverty in the past? We then devote a sizable section to the issue of in-work poverty, as this is essential for optimal policy design. A second major part of this paper looks at what policy can do to achieve a better marriage between employment growth and poverty reduction. We discuss indirect policy options, which can help to tackle demand and supply barriers to higher work intensity, particularly among the poor. The major focus, however, is on policies for direct income support of workers. Here we discuss both incremental and innovative policy options. A final section contains some clear suggestions on directions policy could take so as to foster a stronger complementarity between employment and social inclusion .

Against the backdrop of growing income inequalities across industrialized countries, Belgium is a remarkable outlier. While breaks in series and different data sources call for a reasonable degree of caution, there is no indication that disposable household income inequalities among the Belgian population have increased substantially over the past thirty years. In this respect Belgium can represent a crucial case for the GINI project: it is one of few countries where the ‘key variable’ remained stable over time.Turning to the ‘national story of inequality’, stable income inequality may be considered remarkable given the political and economic context . Belgium has experienced a number of major shifts since the early 1980s. Its economy is among the most open and globalized in the world, with economic activity strongly geared towards trade and logistics. Over the last three decades, value added and (to a lesser degree) employment have shifted from manufacturing towards services. From an international perspective, such shifts have often been accompanied by skill-biased technological change and growing wage inequalities.

By way of introduction This report provides the fi rm foundation for anchoring the research that will be performed by the GINI project. It subsequently considers the fi elds covered by each of the main work packages: ● inequalities of income, wealth and education, ● social impacts, ● political and cultural impacts, and ● policy effects on and of inequality. Though extensive this review does not pretend to be exhaustive. The review may be “light” in some respects and can be expanded when the analysis evolves. In each of the four fi elds a signifi cant number of discussion papers will be produced, in total well over 100. These will add to the state of the art while also covering new round and generating results that will be incorporated in the Analysis Reports to be prepared for the work packages. In that sense, the current review provides the starting point. At the same time, the existing body of knowledge is broader or deeper depending on the particular fi eld and its tradition of research. The very motivation of GINI’s focused study of the impacts of inequalities is that a systematic study is lacking and relatively little is known about those impacts. This also holds for the complex collection of, the effects that inequality can have on policy making and the contributions that policies can make to mitigating inequalities but also to enhancing them. By contrast, analyses of inequality itself are many, not least because there is a wide array of inequalities; inequalities have become more easily studied comparatively and much of that analysis has a signifi cant descriptive fl avour that includes an extensive discussion of measurement issues. @GINI hopes to go beyond that and cover the impacts of inequalities at the same time