Eligibility Criteria for Unemployment Benefits

Eligibility criteria for unemployment benefits, which require recipients to actively look for work, take up suitable job offers or take part in active labour market programmes (ALMPs), or risk benefit sanctions, can play an important role in offsetting the negative impact of generous unemployment benefits on employment incentives. This paper presents information on the strictness of eligibility criteria for unemployment benefits for 36 OECD and/or EU member countries. It covers entitlement conditions (employment and/or contribution requirements to gain access to benefits and sanctions for voluntary unemployment), job-search requirements (availability requirements during ALMPs and suitable work criteria), monitoring of job-search effort and sanctions for refusing a job offer or ALMP placement. These qualitative data are then used to compile a composite indicator of the strictness of eligibility criteria and some comparisons are made with the results of a similar exercise for earlier periods. This indicator complements existing cross-country indicators relating to unemployment benefits, such as net replacement rate data from the OECD Tax and Benefits database and data on ALMP expenditure compiled annually by Eurostat and the OECD.