Nine new Flash Reports prepared by the European Social Policy Network (ESPN) are now available and provide information on recent social policy developments in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Serbia and Slovakia.

• At the end of May 2018, the Austrian centre-right government, in office since 2017, announced an institutional reform of public social insurance providers. The reform plans to substantially reduce the number of social insurance institutions, but does not thoroughly address flaws in the current system. More details should become available in autumn 2018.
• The Austrian government intends to introduce maximum benefit levels for the minimum income schemes in the federal states. This would affect many recipients with a migration background as well as households with many children. Debates are ongoing and a draft bill originally announced for June 2018 has been postponed.
• According to the 2018 report of the Belgian Combat Poverty Service, citizens living on social benefits often pay a high price when an adult member joins their household or when additional income is earned by another member of their household. This tends to undermine family life and discourage solidarity.
• The need to improve the efficiency of the Croatian social benefit system, in particular in relation to poverty alleviation, has been highlighted for many years – inter alia by the World Bank and, more recently, by the European Commission. When discussing this, three issues should be distinguished: the institutional architecture, the degree of duplication between local and central level benefits, and the distorting effects of benefits for war veterans.  The Action Plan for Social Benefits 2017-2020 adopted by the Croatian Government in 2018 seems insufficiently ambitious to resolve these challenges.
• Recent changes in Danish migration and integration policies have led to a fall in the number of asylum seekers, and to more refugees becoming integrated in the labour market. There have been positive experiences with work-oriented schemes, whereby refugees learn culture, language and skills while working. However, lower minimum income benefits have led to higher relative poverty rates.
• One of the priorities of the European Union is to move from institutional care to community-based care. In Estonia, the process of deinstitutionalisation started more than a decade ago, but is only now gathering speed with new services being developed and possibilities of including local governments in the service provision being analysed.
• In Iceland, Parliament passed new legislation on state old-age pensions in October 2016 (effective from January 2017). The resulting simplified benefit structure and tougher income-testing rules discouraged old-age pension beneficiaries to work and swiftly became very unpopular. These reforms have been reversed after early elections in October 2017.
• Ongoing negative demographic trends have prompted the Serbian government to renew its pro-birth policy measures. On 28 June 2018, the Parliament adopted the amendments to the Law on Financial Support for Families with Children which substantially increase financial outlays for parental allowances, a main instrument of the pro-birth policy.
• In Slovakia, the minimum wage has increased considerably in recent years. This has sparked debate not only about the labour market consequences of this increase but also about the gap between low wages in the public and private sectors and about future developments.