Housing and Quality Jobs in Europe’s Fight Against Poverty
Affordable homes and decent work require policies informed by rigorous evidence, clear choices about trade-offs and the experience of people living in poverty. A speech by Paloma Lopez Garcia
These concluding remarks were delivered by Paloma Lopez-Garcia, Director of IEP Bocconi, at “Anti-Poverty Strategy: Policies for an Effective Implementation”, organised by IEP Bocconi and the European Commission’s DG EMPL in Milan on 9 October 2026.
I would like to draw together two key lessons from our conversations on housing affordability and job quality. The first concerns how we use evidence to address difficult policy questions. The second concerns whose experience we bring into that process. Both will matter as Europe turns its Anti-Poverty Strategy into practical action.
Let me begin with the temptation to offer simple answers to problems that are anything but simple. Housing affordability and job quality are essential to people’s daily lives. They are also areas in which well-intentioned policies can have different consequences for different groups, and in which the design of an intervention matters as much as its objective.
Our discussion this morning showed why housing is so difficult to get right. A home is a basic necessity. Without decent, secure accommodation, it is difficult to participate fully in society, to plan for the future or simply to live with dignity. Yet housing is also a financial asset. For many European households, their home represents their largest store of wealth and an important source of security in retirement.
These two roles create a tension. Rising property values may strengthen the financial position of existing homeowners while putting ownership further beyond the reach of younger generations.
Policies that protect sitting tenants, including rent controls and strong security of tenure, can provide much-needed stability.
Depending on their design, however, they can also reduce the availability of rental accommodation or make it harder for newcomers to find a home. Those who are already protected and those seeking access do not necessarily have the same interests. Economists will recognise this as an insider–outsider problem, familiar from the labour market.
Nor do the consequences of housing policy stop at the front door. Access to an affordable home affects when young people can leave their parents’ household, whether they can start a family, and whether workers can move to places where jobs are available. A shortage of affordable housing can restrict opportunity well beyond the housing market itself.
The scale of the burden makes action unavoidable.
Across Europe, housing absorbs a substantial share of household income, with tenants often facing particularly heavy costs.
One revealing measure is the housing cost overburden rate: the share of people living in households that spend more than 40 per cent of their disposable income on housing.
In 2025, that share ranged from 26.4 per cent in Greece to 2.4 per cent in Cyprus. Denmark had the second-highest rate, at 23.4 per cent. Housing affordability is therefore a concern for wealthy countries as well as for those with lower average incomes. National averages alone cannot tell us who is struggling or which response will help them.
As we moved to the afternoon’s discussion of job quality, many of the same complexities reappeared. We need to consider the position of people who are already in work alongside the opportunities available to those who want to work but face barriers to doing so.
The European Union’s Anti-Poverty Strategy rightly emphasises that, for people who can work, a quality job offers the best protection against poverty. The word “quality” is essential.
As Giulia Giupponi reminded us, 8.3 per cent of people in work in the EU are at risk of poverty.
The decline in that figure is welcome, but its level should give us pause. For millions of people, employment does not provide an adequate standard of living. Getting people into work is essential to tackling poverty, but we must also ask what those jobs pay and what conditions they offer.
We must then look beyond those already employed. Many people who would like to work face obstacles that wage policy alone cannot remove. Women with caring responsibilities, older workers and people with disabilities may encounter very different barriers.
As Pietro Galeone’s work has shown, there is considerable diversity within these groups as well.
A young person facing a mental health problem and a mother who cannot find affordable childcare will not be helped by exactly the same intervention. Policy must start from an understanding of the obstacle each person faces.
What, then, can we do? Our discussions showed that minimum wages can make an important contribution. Research on the introduction of Germany’s minimum wage found that it increased the pay of low-wage workers with little or no adverse effect on overall employment. We should take that evidence seriously. It shows that improving pay at the bottom need not come at the employment cost sometimes assumed.
But it does not follow that any minimum wage, set at any level, will have the same effects. Outcomes depend on the level of the wage floor, the economic context, differences across sectors and the way statutory minimum wages interact with collective bargaining.
Policymakers also need to examine what happens to hiring and job creation, because these determine the opportunities available to people seeking to enter the labour market. Here again, we must consider both those already in work and those trying to gain access to it.
Pay is only part of the policy response. Childcare and care for older relatives can determine whether taking a job is possible at all. Retirement policies influence whether and when older workers leave employment. An effective strategy must therefore connect policies that improve the quality of jobs with services and institutions that enable people to work.
Housing affordability and job quality thus raise a common challenge. We need policies that provide security while allowing more people to gain access to a home or a decent job. There are real trade-offs, and acknowledging them is a necessary part of responsible policymaking.
Complexity cannot be an excuse for inaction. It should make us more careful about the policies we choose and more willing to evaluate their effects. Research helps us establish which measures work, under what conditions and for whom. It can reveal unintended consequences, identify people who are being left behind and show where a policy needs to change. Evidence will not settle every choice: policymakers must still weigh competing objectives and decide how to distribute costs and benefits. But it can make those choices better informed and more transparent.
That is central to the mission of IEP Bocconi, which I direct. Our role is to bring rigorous research to the questions that matter for public policy, in dialogue with those responsible for taking decisions and putting them into practice. Today’s event illustrated the value of that approach. Academics, European Commission officials, national and local authorities, civil society organisations and practitioners brought different knowledge and perspectives to the same questions. That exchange enriched our understanding of both the problems and the possible responses.
This brings me to my second point: the need to listen to the people whose lives our policies are intended to improve.
As economists, we can sometimes lose sight of the people behind our analysis. I include myself in that criticism. Data are indispensable for identifying patterns and assessing effects, but they cannot, on their own, explain every obstacle people encounter or every reason why a programme fails to reach those who need it.
People with direct experience of poverty and housing exclusion can tell us where an application process becomes impossible to navigate, why support that exists on paper remains out of reach, or how the way a service is delivered affects their dignity. Listening to them helps us ask better research questions and design policies that people can actually use. It also reminds us that those affected by policy should have a voice in shaping it.
I would therefore like to offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who shared their personal experience with us today. Your contributions brought knowledge and perspectives that we could not have gained from statistics alone. They challenged us to connect our analysis more closely to the realities of people’s lives.
The strongest policies will draw on both careful research and that direct experience. We need to know whether a measure works, and we need to understand how people experience it. Bringing these forms of knowledge together should be part of the way we develop policy, implement it and assess its results.
The EU Anti-Poverty Strategy, adopted by the Commission in May, now has to be translated into action. Events such as this one can contribute by building a shared understanding of the evidence, making the difficult choices explicit and keeping the people affected involved in the discussion. The value of our work will ultimately depend on whether it helps improve their lives.
On behalf of IEP Bocconi, I would like to thank all the speakers, stakeholders and participants of the conference. In particular I would like to thank the Commission for its support in organizing this joint conference and its willingness to engage with academic evidence. I hope the conversations we have begun here will continue through the work of turning this evidence and experience into better policy.
IEP Bocconi does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
