The discussion on the revision of the coordination rules of unemployment benefits - a battlefield between East and West

Abstract

Unemployment benefits are a special type of benefit for coordination purposes since Member States exporting benefits tend to fear that supervision of their benefit recipients in the host State will not be satisfactory. For this reason, several complicated rules have been made, which are disadvantageous for the benefit recipients living in a country with low unemployment benefits who last worked in a country with higher benefits. The rules are also disadvantageous for countries with many outgoing frontier workers. Although the proposal for revising the Regulation includes new rules to address these problems, the large differences in interests between Member States make it difficult to reach a compromise.