HIND JALAL, Affiliation Unknown
Email: jalalhind@gmail.com

Created in 1961, Promotion Nationale (PN) is an autonomous public entity in charge of mobilizing an underemployed or unemployed workforce for the implementation of labor intensive projects, calling upon a simple technology likely to provide employment to unskilled workers. It is one of the major programs of social protection in Morocco - the oldest, most important, and best-targeted social program in the country.

Vis-à-vis the importance of rural underemployment, especially during dry years, estimated per million working days, PN aims to improve employment opportunities by developing collective working methods, and by generating large-scale investment for the realization of public infrastructure projects and rural equipment. This institution aims at limiting rural migration through the permanent improvement of local incomes and living conditions. It thus constitutes a safety net for a large part of the population, especially in rural areas. Forty-five years after its creation, PN has at its credit an important and single assessment regarding the fight against unemployment with minimal management costs, in spite of certain difficulties and limitations that hinder the organization, particularly in terms of the geographical targeting of rural poverty zones.

HILARY SILVER, Brown University
Email: Hilary_Silver@brown.edu

Most theorists maintain that social exclusion is a process, not only the condition reflecting the outcome of that process. Yet few, if any people ever reach the ultimate end of the imagined trajectory. There are no formal exclusion thresholds to cross, as exist for poverty. Rather, at any one time, people are situated on a multi-dimensional continuum and may be moving towards inclusion in one or another sense or towards a state of comprehensive, cumulative social rupture. This process has been labeled social disaffiliation or disqualification, among other terms, and encompasses humiliation as well as social isolation. Longitudinal and panel studies reviewed here document some of the mechanisms of individuals' downward spiral with the accumulation of dimensions of exclusion. At a more macro-level, groups, communities, and societies also may undergo a process of social exclusion from larger collectivities in which progressive isolation and a decline of solidarity give rise to new social boundaries - exclusion lines, so to speak -- between insiders and outsiders. The process of residential segregation is a notable example. Despite the EU's designation of common exclusion indicators, national differences in the meaning of social exclusion, in contrast to poverty, may impede comparative study. The concept and its measures are still evolving.

MARKUS CLAUSS, Affiliation Unknown
Email: clauss@zew.de
REINHOLD SCHNABEL, Affiliation Unknown

We estimate the effects of the reform of the German Unemployment Insurance that replaced the wage related Unemployment Assistance with an income maintenance program and stronger means testing. We model the tax-benefit system and use the Socio-Economic Panel. We estimate a discrete labour supply model and simulate the behavioural and distributional effects using the pseudo-distribution method. Poverty and inequality decline overall, since households with children and low income gain, while those who used to earn high wages and received high unemployment transfers lose most. The behavioural responses mitigate the redistributive impact of the reform.