Young Adults, Poverty and the Role of Social Policies

Abstract

As this book well illustrates, young adults finishing education, leaving the parental home, entering the labour market, and starting families face many different challenges (and threats). The risk of becoming poor is one of the most relevant given that the economic crisis has hit young adults extremely hard in some European countries. Interestingly, the specific role played by the welfare state in sustaining the transition to adulthood and preventing poverty has been scarcely analysed in the literature. Recently, an increasing number of studies have focused on young adults and poverty (Mendola et al., 2009), but this literature usually contains only a basic discussion of the role of the welfare state. When adopting quantitative analysis, the studies tend to reduce and synthesise the role of the welfare state to single-country models (the Spanish, the German, etc.) or regime-type dummy variables (the Mediterranean, the Continental, etc.), and use them in regression analysis as proxies for the different functioning of national welfare states (Iacovou et al., 2007). Such studies are more interested in the different forms that poverty takes rather than in analysing the role of social policies. At the same time, the more qualitative studies of social policy focus on specific issues (active labour market policies, education, etc.) (Walther and Pohl, 2005).