ABSTRACT
Structural unemployment is the second major ‘new social risk’ habitually associated with structural change in the labour market, particularly the demand shift against the less-skilled. As I proposed in the general introduction, it is often said that the traditional pillars of income protection – social insurance and social assistance – are not particularly well-adapted for dealing with the social risk of unemployment as it presents itself today, i.e., as a problem of structural labour market exclusion rather than as a risk-induced and typically temporary phenomenon. Basically, the claim here is that the distributional effectiveness, the economic efficiency and the political legitimacy of the social insurance/social assistance-based model crucially hinges on a state that approaches full employment, i.e., the sufficient availability of jobs that enable economic self-reliance.
