ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the main recent developments in Belgium’s welfare state. Belgium remains a country where change tends to happen through incremental, piece-by-piece changes that do not lend themselves easily to concise description. Broadly speaking, the past three decades have been shaped by concurrent concerns and long-stretched incremental reform processes. A paramount concern has been cost containment. Growing numbers of claimants in schemes like unemployment, early retirement, and sickness have necessitated this, especially since economic upturns failed to reduce caseloads. At the same time, the welfare state has taken on new functions, responding to new social risks and needs, such as in the areas of work-life or ageing. That has gone to some extent at the cost of the old core function of income maintenance. Activation has featured very strongly in policy discourse from the early 2000s onwards, but its implementation has remained hesitant and ineffective. Moreover, a trajectory of piecemeal adaptation has come at a cost in terms of policy consistency and transparency. Also, the pace of gradual change remains simply too slow to ensure successful adaptation.