Minimum income protection and European integration: trends and levels of minimum benefits in comparative perspective, 1990-2005.

This article draws attention to the Europeanization of social policy and the development of minimum income protection in a large number of welfare democracies. The empirical analyses are based on unique institutional and comparative data on benefit levels from the Social Assistance and Minimum Income Protection Interim Dataset. There is some evidence of convergence in benefit levels among the European countries in the new millennium, but there is no clear proof of universal ambitions to fight poverty or of the existence of a single European social model. There are still welfare front-runners and those who lag behind in this regard, not only among industrial welfare democracies in general but also in Europe.