Starea socială a populației comparație RO-UE

Quality is at the heart of the European social model. It is a key element in promoting employment in a competitive and inclusive knowledge economy.

Quality reflects the desire, not just to defend minimum standards, but to promote rising standards and ensure a more equitable sharing of progress. It delivers results - embracing the economy, the workplace, the home, society at large. It links the dual goals of competitiveness and cohesion in a sustainable way, with clear economic benefits flowing from investing in people and strong, supportive, social systems.

Quality in work and modernizing the European social model

Promoting quality in employment and social policy is a key element in reaching the goals of building more and better jobs, creating a competitive and cohesive knowledge-based economy, and ensuring a positive mutual interaction between economic, employment and social policies. As such, quality can, and must, go hand in hand with improving efficiency, especially as far as public finances and labor market incentives are concerned.

Social policies are not simply an outcome of good economic performance and policies but are at the same time an input and a framework. In this context, the modernization of the social model means developing and adapting it to take account of the rapidly changing new economy and society, and to ensure the positive mutually supportive role of economic and social policies.

Many aspects of the modernization of the social model can be expected to impact positively on the quality of work – including both social investments and social transfers. Hence the pursuit of more and better employment and higher levels of economic performance cannot be separated from the overall aims of the modernization of the European Social model which, in its diverse forms within the Union, has played a crucial role in helping maintain continually rising productivity and living standards across the Union, while helping ensure that the benefits are widely shared.

The European social model is highly valued by the EU's citizens, and much admired by the rest of the world, including the candidate countries. It has facilitated the adaptation to change in the past, as it is now helping Europe make the transition to the knowledge-based economy. Citizens from candidate countries, who are undergoing the difficult process of transition, look to the European social approach as the most efficient way to build a modern, socially inclusive, society.

At the moment, various modernization processes are under way in order to support and promote modernizing the European social model, including the Luxembourg process on employment, the open co-ordination processes on social exclusion and social protection, the ongoing work on equal opportunities, and work on health and safety.

Characteristics of the European Social Model

The European social model is distinguished from others by its framework and design, and by the nature, focus and distribution of the policies. It is not distinguished from social systems in other countries by its levels of expenditure, but by its methods of funding. The main differences in social spending between developed countries, notably between Europe and the US, is that funding is mainly public in Europe, and much more private in the US, although part of private expenditure in the US is effectively mandatory. However, the benefits appear to be much more evenly spread in Europe than they are in the US, where, for example, 40 per cent of the population does not have access to primary health care, even though spending per head is actually higher as a proportion of GDP than it is in Europe.

Estimates of the real resource costs of social policies have frequently been distorted by failing to take account of such factors as whether transfers are taxed or not, or the existence of mandatory private spending on insurance and health.

Social policies perform economic as well as social functions with employment and incomes as the essential links between the two. Hence many social policies are in the form of social investments - notably education and health - which directly impact on and input into the economic system and employment. At the same time social transfers are important, not only in reducing the incidence and costs of social exclusion, but also in facilitating adaptability and responsiveness to change i.e. in allowing an effective combination of flexibility and security at the workplace and in the labour market generally. Modernizing the way in which the social model delivers investments and passive support can therefore impact positively on the quality of work.

Well designed social investments can, like other forms of investment, contribute to rising productivity, rising living standards and growth. This is apparent at a macro-economic level where a positive correlation between investments in education and overall economic performance is well established4 and analytical work on the determinants of economic growth and rising living standards generally highlight the growing importance of human resource and knowledge investment5.

Basic and higher level skills are fundamental to the pursuit of quality in work, and

productivity growth especially when they embrace modern labour market needs such as the capacity to undertake complex tasks in a flexible way in a modern work environment, not just the ability to perform routine machine-related tasks.

The relation between low or no skills and job prospects, low pay and poverty is important. A shortage of highly skilled people tends to push up wages at the top end of the income scale, while a surplus of people with few or no skills tends to push down wages at the bottom. The result is to increase the scale of social transfers needed in order to bring low-wage household incomes up to minimum, socially accepted, levels.

Despite the above evidence, and despite continued widespread popular public support for Europe’s social systems, the benefits of Europe's high quality social policies and their relationship to quality in work are often taken for granted, or under-valued. In general there is a tendency to forget or overlook the ‘counter-factual’ alternative - the cost of not having such social policies in place. There is also a tendency to under-estimate the need for increased short-term social support and investment in times of rapid social, economic and industrial change, in order to avoid 'wastage' and under-use of human resource capacities – underlining, again, the potential benefits of the modernization of social policies.