Abstract
Denmark is internationally known for its mature welfare state covering almost all people in need of cash benefits or social services. Relatively speaking, Denmark has a high degree of socio-economic equality among its citizens, although recent developments in Danish politics towards immigrants and refugees challenge this rosy picture. In the late 1990s and at the beginning of the new millennium, Denmark and a few other countries like Ireland and the Netherlands were known as the ‘European miracles’, with low unemployment rates and low inflation. Paradoxically, however, despite the low unemployment rate in Denmark, there seems to be a rather large group of marginal people who are almost impossible to employ in the regular labour market. At the same time, the active role of Danish citizens is stressed more than ever and most forcefully demonstrated through the activation policy that demands of everybody that they have to participate on the labour market (Larsen, 2002a). The discrepancy between the totalising activation line and a large group of hard-to-employ has marked a second front-line in social policy. There is a growing recognition of the difficulties that social and labour market policies face in relation to bringing the hard-to-employ into the regular labour market. Instead of a hardcore activation policy, different types of ‘social activation’ have been implemented aiming at some kind social and spatial integration of marginal people.
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Larsen, J.E. (2004). The Politics of Marginal Space. In: Andersen, J., Siim, B. (eds) The Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403990013_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403990013_12
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