Social services and policies (including but not limited to education, healthcare, early childhood care, long-term care, family planning, housing support, and active labour market policies) have been identified as pivotal drivers of sustainable competitiveness and inclusive prosperity. They are considered to be productive institutions that expand individual and collective capabilities, enhance human capital while having a broader impact on human development, stabilise the level of rights enjoyment over the life course, and promote innovation and adaptability.

While the provision and organisation of these services primarily fall within the jurisdiction of Member States, their transformative potential is increasingly influenced by the EU legal and policy framework. The term encompasses three distinct categories of EU-related financial instruments and policies. The first category is EU hard law, which comprises legal regulations concerning state aid, competition, and the internal market. The second category is EU soft law, encompassing strategies and policies formally adopted by EU institutions and member states. The third category is relevant EU financial instruments, including the European Social Fund+, the Cohesion and Structural Funds, among others.

SWINS is part of the paradigm shift in the way welfare is conceptualised and operationalised within the European context. Departing from the conventional interpretation of welfare as a reactive system intended to safeguard individuals from market failures, our objective is to fortify a strategic vision in which social policy functions as a pivotal catalyst of competitiveness, long-term resilience, and sustainable well-being.

In this context, we adopt the expression “social services and policies” to encompass both in-kind interventions (such as early childhood education and care, healthcare, long-term care, and housing support) and enabling social policies, including active labour market measures, unemployment benefits, and minimum income schemes. These services and policies are not treated as discrete instruments, but rather as interconnected elements that function simultaneously as enablers of individual agency and as structural mechanisms for macro-social stability.

For analytical and operational purposes, SWINS will primarily focus on three core domains that can be meaningfully addressed through both micro-level simulations and macro-level assessments: care (broadly conceived across the life course), health, and active labour market policies. While this focus does not exhaust the range of relevant interventions, it provides a coherent basis for exploring the transformative potential of social investment within the scope of the project.

A fundamental analytical challenge that SWINS endeavours to address is the development of a framework capable of tracing the influence of alternative macro-configurations of social services and policies on key societal outcomes. These outcomes are influenced by the impact of these services and policies on individuals’ lives, behaviours, and achievements. The aforementioned outcomes encompass both conventional indicators, such as economic growth and employment, and more transformative objectives linked to the transition toward a sustainable and inclusive wellbeing society. This transition can only be meaningfully pursued through an analytical pathway that fully acknowledges and leverages the complementarities between a systemic vision and an agent-based perspective.

SWINS Objectives

SWINS pursues five key objectives:

• The goal is to find out which social services are worth the money and can improve people’s lives over time. We’re especially interested in services that help people grow and develop, reduce inequalities between generations, and encourage people to be capable and active citizens.
• SWINS tries to explain how these factors affect relevant economic factors, like employment, income distribution, financial stability, and domestic demand.
• SWINS creates a clear model that combines small-scale effects with large-scale results, allowing for a more complete evaluation of policy impact.
• The framework provides a way to include social investment evaluation in the tools used to assess financial and policy issues. This allows policymakers to consider long-term benefits alongside short-term costs which form a SWINS perspective are investment.
• SWINS wants to change how Europe manages its economy. It suggests that we include measures of wellbeing, social connection, and environmental sustainability with the usual indicators of competitiveness.

SWINS is about more than just spending more on social programs. Instead, it suggests a new way of talking about policy, focusing on how investments are made instead of how much is spent. This approach describes a way to put the idea of long-term resilience into practice.

Read SWINS Theoretical Framework to know more on this!