Managing household debts: Social service provision in the EU - Workshop report

Corporate, Eurofound

Overview

Research report

Managing household debts: Social service provision in the EU - Workshop report

Published: 14 October 2010

Overall, household debt levels have risen sharply over the past decades in EU Member States. While certain levels of household debts can be beneficial, they can become problematic especially with a sudden, unexpected decrease of incomes or increase of expenditures. The current financial crisis caused unemployment levels to rise, with the lagged impact still to be felt. This combination of factors lead to increased over-indebtedness among households. The participants in the workshop that took place in June 2010 discussed preventive and alleviative measures and the role of social services in this matter. They mapped current and planned activities of the different organisations, identified needs for further research, and discussed a potential future role for Eurofound. A working paper is available (see Related content).

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Number of pages

8

Reference no.

EF1067

Research report

6 December 2011

Managing household debts: Social service provision in the EU - Working paper

Household over-indebtedness is among the causes of the current financial crisis. In turn, the crisis exacerbated both public and private debt problems. In this paper, household over-indebtedness is broadly defined as the situation where a household cannot comply with payment requirements – whether it be mortgage, utility or consumer credit payments – on a structural basis. Different types of over-indebtedness are interrelated in complex causal networks with a broad spectrum of social and health issues such as poverty, social exclusion, unemployment and labour productivity. Appropriate service provision can alleviate the problem once it has occurred, or can prevent debts from becoming problematic in the first place. This paper discusses the need for policymakers and society at large to scale up the quality of these social services. A workshop report is available (see Related content).