Thomas Bahle, Vanessa Hubl, Michaela Pfeifer
	The last safety net
	A handbook of minimum income protection in Europe
	264 pages, Bristol, The Policy Press, 2011
	ISBN 978-1-84742-7250

Abstract

Minimum income protection provides the last social safety net for people in need. The book gives an in-depth study of minimum income protection in 17 European countries based on a newly developed dataset. It combines country-specific sections describing the institutional framework of minimum income protection with comparative analyses of the development of benefit levels, beneficiaries, expenditures and institutional structures throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
The last safety net is a rich source of up-to-date information on an important field of social protection that is often neglected in the study of social citizenship rights. The authors show that there is great variation in the institutional setup and generosity of minimum income protection as well as its importance in the wider architecture of social protection systems in European countries.
The information contained in this study will be of major interest not only to scholars and students of income protection, poverty and the welfare state, but also to policy makers in these fields.

Contents

Introduction
Defining and measuring minimum income protection
Welfare state contexts
Country analyses
Comparative analyses
Conclusion
Bibliography  
Index

Notes on Author

The country analyses include articles by Tomáš Sirovátka (Czech Republic), Anna Baranowska and Katarzyna Piętka-Kosińska (Poland), Mónika Bálint, Zsuzsanna Szabó and Dániel Horn (Hungary), and Daniel Gerbery (Slovakia).