Social Benefits, Related Entitlements and Local Social Support: A New Assessment

[eng] We draw up an inventory of entitlements related to social benefits and social support available locally to beneficiaries of the revenu de solidarité active (RSA, the current scheme of minimum income) in 20 French cities, including Paris, Lyon and Marseille. We then compare the social scales inventoried in 2020 to those collected in 2001 and 2007, i.e. prior to the switch from the previous minimum income scheme (RMI) to the RSA. We show an overall shift towards more degressive conditions for granting support. In all the cities covered and for all family configurations, threshold effects have become limited, at the cost of a sometimes high degree of complexity. The only exception is Paris, where social support is generally more generous and where threshold effects remain. Taken as a whole, local social support scales have been brought into line with the RSA scale, whereas prior to 2008 they were more in line with the RMI scale, which confirms the guiding role played by national scales on local scales. In particular, we examine the effects of these transformations on the standard of living of recipient households and on incentives to work.