ABSTRACT
Over the last 20 years, all societies in Western Europe have seen a rapid increase in the population receiving state benefits, in most cases people who have been excluded or distanced from the labour market. Admittedly, this phenomenon has assumed differing proportions from one country to the next, but no country has really been spared, to a point where those systems for combating poverty which once seemed the most robust, the German and Scandinavian models for example, are now displaying their limits too. Each country is drawing on its resources to try and cope with this development and experimenting with various solutions which are currently being evaluated.
