Toward Adequate Minimum Incomes: Which Role for Europe?

Involvement in poverty reduction at the European Union level remains mainly limited to soft governance initiatives, such as the formulation of nonbinding outcome targets and the monitoring of Member States’ progress toward these targets in the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) Social Inclusion and more recently in the revised European Semester. This chapter asks how to give more bite to European social governance and how to further “socialize” the existing Europe 2020 strategy and the European Semester. It argues that binding input governance in the field of minimum income protection is the place to start. As a first step, the chapter proposes augmenting the so-called auxiliary output indicators with relevant input indicators.