ABSTRACT

Only a few years ago “the absence of a national income safety net” could be identified as a defining feature of the “rudimentary social assistance regime of south Europe”.1 It is rather characteristic of the pace of change in this area that what a few years ago held for all of Southern Europe now is only true for Greece. Indeed, as the other contributions to this volume explain, fully-fledged minimum income schemes now operate in Portugal and in certain Spanish regions, while an experiment involving a number of Italian municipalities is still in progress.2 Greece, on the other hand, seems so far unable to go beyond the level of policy debates; as shown later on in the chapter, the option of introducing some form of minimum income guarantee is still considered too contentious.