Assessing the Impact of Intra-EU Mobility on National Welfare States: Who Receives Which Benefits? A Cross-Country Comparison

The scope of this paper is to explore the profiles of European citizens who access social benefits in host Member States, and to highlight the patters of their welfare use. Even though the accessibility of host welfare states by EU citizens have been in the public eye since the Eastern Enlargements and the 2008 economic crisis, still little is known about who exactly receives which benefits. This research aims to answer the questions: 1. Do the populations of European citizens vary across countries according to their demographic and socio-economic characteristics? 2. Are the EU citizens enjoying benefits in the same way of natives in the country of destination or different patterns can be identified? Firstly, a descriptive analysis is run to compare the population of EU citizens across five Member States of destination (Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, and the UK). Subsequently, their probability to access unemployment and family benefits on EU-LFS and EU-SILC databases, respectively. Finally, the share of benefits receipt is explored along years since arrival and across different EU origins (EU15, EU10 and EU3). The findings confirm that the populations of European citizens present substantially different characteristics across host Member States, both in respect to the native populations and among themselves. On the one hand, they are more likely to be women, tertiary educated and at risk of unemployment compared to natives. On the other hand, EU citizens present important variations according to the group of origin: the share of high professionals among EU15 is significantly higher compared to natives, while among EU10 and EU3 the same is considerably lower. Notwithstanding these premises, the use of welfare by mobile European does not seem to differ substantially from the one of natives across countries. In Austria only they have been found statistically less likely to receive family benefits.