Changing target groups

Encompassing everybody is, in principle, the vision of activation. In practice, young claimants of social assistance were the first to be targeted by activation in 1978. In the 1990s the insured unemployed and sick-listed persons became targets of activation and most recently this is also the case for persons with handicap and persons from ethnic minorities. 

A significant share of the population (7% of the population aged 18-67) is not in employment and hves off social security. To the share of non-employed or hidden unemployed, one could add people of working age who have withdrawn temporarily or permanently from the labour market on leave schemes or voluntary early retirement pay, respectively. This equals a share of 12% of the people of working age in receipt of either disability pension, voluntary early retirement pay or leave schemes. 

Note Full-time residents in Denmark, 31 December in the given year, i.e. excluding dead and migrants in the year. Activation is exclusive of wage subsidy schemes and voluntary early retirement. It includes the transitional allowance from 1994 onwards. 

Nevertheless, the share of benefit claimants has remained more stable than the development in the particular schemes. In 2005 the population share of claimants was 7% lower than in 1993, but 7% higher than in 1990. About one out of four Danes of working age receives social security, social assistance or activation benefits at any given point in time. Measured in this way, the employment policies since the 1990s have not been particularly successful. Indeed, the permanence of total numbers bears witness to the difficulty of getting everyone to become self-supporting. 

But totals mask underlying important changes between and within benefit schemes. Besides the above changes, Table 19 shows how the number of sickness beneficiaries has gone up from 38,000 persons in 1993 to 69,000 persons in 2005, reflecting not only that the labour force has grown but also that this growth is in part made up by people who are more frail and thus more likely to become sick and reliant on sickness benefits than the people in the previous labour force. In other words, to achieve a successful increase in the employment rate, one must accept that sickness absenteeism is also likely to increase. 

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This paper contributes to a better understanding of the changing nature of Danish labour market policies and experiences made. The paper sets out the Danish situation of the political ideas of activation (Sect. 2), changing target groups (Sect. 3), labour law (Sect. 4), unemployment insurance (Sect. 5), activation (Sect. 6), and their outcomes (Sect. 7). 

The target group has changed over time and so has the specification of the unemployment groups that are eligible for activation. 

The dominant idea in the 1990s was to continuously strengthen the qualifications and the availability of the unemployed (and employed) to meet the changing demands for labom, and measures could be said to serve two different sets of objectives and target groups ... 

It seems to us important that all the steps of this sequence of approximations, in which the quality of the representation is inversely related to the distance from the target group, are methodologically connected, without abrupt changes of quality. This objective may be reached by different combinations of the method considered above, and the decisive point for the winning formulation will be made by other factors, such as the versatility of the program and the transferability of the components. 

Develop theories about mechanisms which can motivate the target group to initiate change, or which can hinder the change in order to ensure the comprehensiveness of the analysis, the mechanisms should be selected from the taxonomy proposed in Table 1. For instance, following the previous examples, the mechanisms could be the Motivation of the workers and the Fear of failure . 

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