Generous welfare benefits make people more likely to want to work, not less

Date:
March 31, 2015

Source:
SAGE Publications

Summary:
Generous welfare benefit levels make people who are not in employment more likely to want to work rather than less, new research suggests. "Many scholars and commentators fear that generous social benefits threaten the sustainability of the welfare state due to work norm erosion, disincentives to work and dependency cultures," the researchers say. "This article concludes that there are few signs that groups with traditionally weaker bonds to the labor market are less motivated to work if they live in generous and activating welfare states."

Exerpt:
Survey responses from 19,000 people in 18 European countries, including the UK, showed that "the notion that big welfare states are associated with widespread cultures of dependency, or other adverse consequences of poor short term incentives to work, receives little support."
Sociologists Dr Kjetil van der Wel and Dr Knut Halvorsen examined responses to the statement 'I would enjoy having a paid job even if I did not need the money' put to the interviewees for the European Social Survey in 2010.
In a paper published in the journal Work, Employment and Society they compare this response with the amount the country spent on welfare benefits and employment schemes, while taking into account the population differences between states.
The researchers, of Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway, found that the more a country paid to the unemployed or sick, and invested in employment schemes, the more its likely people were likely to agree with the statement, whether employed or not.
They found that almost 80% of people in Norway, which pays the highest benefits of the 18 countries, agreed with the statement. By contrast in Estonia, one of least generous, only around 40% did.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150331074345.htm

lol another conservative lie goes down in flames.