Is labour market policy heading for social investment in European countries?

Abstract From a perspective of social investment, this article analyses monetary efforts made by European countries in terms of active and passive labour market policy (LMP) between 2006 and 2015. How did spending evolve under the double impression of the social investment discourse and the crisis after 2008? How does LMP now differ from what it was before the crisis? We find that there is no real trend towards social investment in the field of LMP in recent years. This shows both in the relationship between passive and active spending and in the composition of active spending. In particular, training – crucial to a social investment approach – is further weakened in most countries’ policy arrangements. Concerning levels of spending, it is shown that labour market policy gets fiscally more demanding on aggregate, while the amount of resources made available to the average individual job seeker shrinks. Spending on LMP also remains very unequal between European countries.