European Employment Policy: the European Commission's Approach to Unemployment Benefits

Unemployment insurance is a major component of different European welfare regimes, whereby each EU member state has its own distinctive scheme. Although as a domestic fiscal and social policy, unemployment benefits fall under national competence, the European Commission has exercised pressure over this policy area already since the establishment of the European Employment Strategy (EES), and more directly within the framework of the European Semester (ES). This dissertation retraces the history of the EES since the 1990s, and then, by focusing on the ES procedures, it analyses both in qualitative and quantitative terms the Commission's approach to unemployment benefits. On the qualitative side, this dissertation explores key EU documents (such as, the yearly AGS - Annual Growth Survey, JER - Joint Employment Report and CRs - Country Reports) to review how the Commission addresses national unemployment benefits and how it conceptualises this social policy. Then, on the quantitative side, this dissertation analyses the endorsed Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs) that deal with unemployment benefits, with the aim of assessing whether the recommendations aim at the EU-wide convergence of specific features of this insurance scheme, thereby matching each member state’s unemployment benefits scheme with the received recommendations. To this end and to improve the precision of matching, this dissertation, first, individuates several categories within the policy area of unemployment benefits, next, it assigns each CSR to one or more of these categories and, finally, determines whether the recommendations are pro-labour or pro-market. These three parts combined shed light on the direction, intensity and possible pro- or anti-labour biases of the European Commission's approach to national unemployment insurance schemes.