Free Movement and European Welfare States: Why Child Benefits for EU Workers Should Not Be Exportable

The regulation of the free movement of workers in the European Union (EU), and specifically EU (migrant) workers’ access to welfare benefits in the host country, has generated considerable political conflicts within and across EU Member States in recent years. These conflicts have the potential to threaten the future political sustainability of unrestricted intra-EU labour mobility and broader processes of European integration. In this paper, we provide an institutional analysis of one specific issue that has been at the heart of these debates: the exportability of child benefits. Under the current EU rules, ‘EU workers’ (i.e. mobile EU citizens who live and work in a Member State where they do not hold national citizenship) can “export” family benefits to their children and other family members resident in the home country. A number of EU countries have demanded a change to these rules. We argue that the political conflicts about exporting child benefits are, at least in part, due to a fundamental tension between the ‘employment-based’ institutional logic that regulates EU workers’ access to child and family benefits and the ‘residence-based’ institutional logic that underpins family policy in all Member States. To reduce this tension, we make the case for changing the principles for coordinating EU workers’ access to welfare benefits, which would mean, as a consequence, that the exportability of child benefits would no longer apply. It is the country where the child lives, rather than the country where the working parent/spouse (‘breadwinner’) is employed that should bear the responsibility for providing child benefits.