Do public policies reduce social exclusion? The role of national and supranational economic tools

Social Exclusion is a major concern for EU institutions and several instruments have been devised to counter it. This work aims to assess the role played by policy measures in fighting social exclusion in the EU, distinguishing between national and supranational tools. Given the available data, we run a multilevel model, combining national and regional observations for 20 EU Member States between 2005 and 2016. We use social expenditure and resilience as proxies for national tools and the Regional Policy funding as a proxy for supranational tools. Our results confirm the relevance of both types of policy measures. In particular, we find that resilience reduces social exclusion significantly, while social expenditure has a non-significant (though negative) effect. The EU funding on the other hand successfully decreases social exclusion, but if regional dummies are introduced, the effect holds only for Eastern European countries.