A Report on the transposition of EU guidelines and directives in the most recent 27 National Reform Programmes

The central aim of Deliverable 9.1 is to identify possible trends EU member states’ social policies in relation to a number of important citizenship issues. The broader objective of WP9 is to study the relationship between the effects of discrepancies between respective civil, political, social, and economic citizenship rights and obligations of European and non-European citizens as family members moving across borders. Within this project, we have identified four themes to focus on: care for the elderly, non-national care workers, the reproductive rights of family members and mobile youth. For this deliverable, we have evaluated (i) the 2013 National Reform Programmes of those 23 member states that had National Reform Programmes available and in the English language (exceptions include France, Portugal and Romania) and (ii) the 2014 National Reform Programmes for Croatia and Ireland who did not have a 2013 document. The analytic perspective used in this evaluation has been the policy-scientific approach of Leeuw (2003).
The current deliverable contains a first short description of EU guidelines and a descriptive summary of member state discourses on these four themes. Utrecht University has coordinated the task and one partner has contributed by delivering an analysis of the 2014 Croatian National Reform Programme. The working process included several steps:
- Desk top research to select relevant themes for the analysis.
- Reading and coding all of the Europe 2020 documents and 2013 National Reform Programmes for any information on care for the elderly, non-national care workers, reproductive rights of men and women (including migrants) and mobile youth.
- Coding each of these themes into relevant sub-themes related to citizenship rights.
- A draft version of this report was discussed at the bEUcitizen conference in Istanbul, Turkey in late June/early July 2014. WP9 members provided comments on this report at that stage.
- Additional data was collected for Croatia, which joined the EU in 2013 and produced its first National Reform Programme in 2014. Additional data was collected for Ireland, who had not produced a 2013 National Reform Programme. The 2014 National Reform Programmes of both Croatia and Ireland are included here.