The European employment strategy seeks to increase employment rates of all social groups, thereby enlarging the focus from the unemployed to also the inactive, i.e. to all non-employed persons. The goal of this internationally comparative project is the analysis of the conditions for cross-national variations in non-employment and its varying socio-demographic composition. The project focuses on the impact of the welfare state context on the interaction of individual and social resources as well as constraints, which influence labour demand and supply. In particular, the project investigates the degree of non-employment of working age people, its multiple reasons and its role in the life course. Furthermore, the project analyzes non-employment in the household context and the dynamics between household members. Of particular interest are those socio-demographic groups and household types which are at higher risk of non-employment. In a first step (Western) European differences in individual non-employment are analyzed with macro-indicators. Thereafter longitudinal data on Germany is compared with four different employment systems: Denmark, United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands. Combining internationally comparative macro-level analyses with micro-level data enables the project to study institutional configurations, individual factors, and household contexts as factors of non-employment and their causal interactions.
