Unemployment‑benefit coverage: Recent trends and their drivers

This chapter discusses the scope of unemployment‑benefit systems, documents recent trends in the number of benefit recipients, and presents alternative measures of benefit coverage in comparative perspective. A decomposition analysis for selected countries seeks to identify key driving forces behind observed coverage trends, including labour‑market and demographic changes, as well as benefit policy reforms. In most countries, only a minority of jobseekers receive unemployment benefits and while benefit receipt has increased substantially during the early post‑crisis period, this has failed to arrest the longer‑term trend towards falling benefit coverage documented in earlier studies. Although composition effects account for a significant share of the recent decline of benefit coverage, some of it is a result of policy reforms that have reduced unemployment‑benefit generosity either in search of budgetary savings or in an effort to articulate job‑search incentives for the unemployed.