This Welfair Working Group session features Pol Barbé Sanromà (KU Leuven) on Social investment and migration: Integration through the lens of education, and Giovanni Greco (EUI Visiting Student) presenting his paper, Uncertainty and policy success: an overview on adult training.
Presenter: Giovanni Greco
Title: Uncertainty and policy success: an overview on adult training
Abstract:
Deindustrialization has put traditional welfare under strain. Structural trends like technological change, occupational upgrading and shifting skill demands risk marginalizing vulnerable groups, and traditional passive welfare measures do not address these challenges. This lack of social protection has pushed countries towards the development of social investment policies, an approach to social policy integrating redistribution policies with the enhancement of people’s capabilities so as to better navigate the knowledge economy. Adult training is part of the social investment package. The idea is that training improves skills, which can then be used by individuals to cope with new technologies. However, training participation is still low in most European countries. Explanations for low participation rates are multiple; some of the most popular are time availability, monetary costs and personal preferences. A surprisingly underexplored explanation is returns to training. Rewards shape motivation. In the context of training, rewards might feed back into training participation.
This paper studies whether training participation is higher when returns to training are less uncertain. When post-training gains are predictable, participation rates might be higher than when individuals cannot anticipate gains from training. This paper does not study the predicting role of average premia on training enrollment, but the role of the dispersion of these premia. Returns are understood in terms of occupational earning potential (OEP), which ranks occupation on the basis of their median income. All analyses are run separately by gender to account for the different training and occupational trajectories of men and women. Reasonably, the issue of unpredictability could concern people to different degrees depending on the national institutional framework. The paper explores variation of results depending on the level of employment protection in a country: higher protection reduces the social-protection rationale of training and, thus, I expect that the main relation of interest is more negative when employment protection is higher. Empirically, a pseudo panel is built based on EU-LFS yearly data, where cohorts from several European countries are followed over time. I examine the relation between training enrollment and the OEP. Training is demeaned as to eliminate variance between cohorts. Mixed models are used, so that training’s random slope can be extracted and later used to quantify rewards’ uncertainty. More details will be provided during the presentation.
Presenter: Pol Barbé Sanromà
Title: Social investment and Migration: Integration through the lens of education
Abstract:
The social investment paradigm offers a promising framework for the socio-economic integration of migrants and refugees into host societies. However, the intersection between social investment policies and migration, remains largely unexplored. Conventional social investment strategies, which often prioritise human capital and labour market integration as a fast track to social inclusion, often neglect the broader goals of social empowerment and capacity building within migrant communities. Migrant and refugee integration challenges the current social investment paradigm due to their distinct and heterogeneous human capital trajectories. Educational policies constitute the main way through which social investment theory can account for migrant integration across the life course. This article argues for a comprehensive approach to migrant integration within social investment policies, developing the role of the capability approach and its intersectionality with human capital and labour market integration. To operationalise this, we introduce a capability-oriented social investment framework to provide a deeper theoretical understanding of how education can promote migrant integration beyond the labour market. To this end, we develop the role of conversion factors in education policies for migrant integration, which transform education opportunities into tangible real-life outcomes for migrants and refugees.
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