ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates both the theoretical and empirical consequences of making-work-pay policies for continental countries, taking the Belgian welfare state as a case study. It provides the labour market performance and poverty outcomes in the Belgian and other welfare states based on comparative employment and poverty data. The chapter reviews an institutional analysis of the Belgian social protection model against unemployment in a comparative perspective. It considers the developments in relation to making-work-pay policies in Belgium by illustrating the effects of these policies on net incomes for low-wage earners and on net replacement rates for the unemployed by using a tax-benefit model for hypothetical household situations. Compared to continental European countries such as Belgium, wage dispersion is substantially larger in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the number of vulnerable family types such as lone-parent families higher and the level of social expenditure lower.
