As noted in Eurodiaconia’s briefing on the state of play regarding Minimum Income schemes in Europe, existing safety nets for those who don’t have access to (decent) jobs are rarely sufficient to meet their beneficiaries’ needs. Reference budgets provide a key tool in addressing this challenge and have already been introduced in various EU Member States; however, they have been created (largely) independently from each other, which currently restricts cross-country comparisons and mutual learning.
Therefore, the European Commission recently launched a pilot project to develop a common methodology for reference budgets in the EU. The aim was to establish a network of experts to exchange practices, to develop a common methodological framework to enable cross-country comparisons and policy learning, and to complete reference budgets for selected countries. Eurodiaconia was involved in the expert network and contributed to the project by sharing member perspectives and experiences. This briefing provides an introduction to the topic of reference budgets and summarises the key outcomes of the EU reference budget project.