Incentivising employment of persons with disabilities in the open labour market – mapping of national policies, strategies and measures (Thematic Review 2024, Synthesis Report)
European Commission thematic review (European Centre of Expertise; Nicola Duell and Inga Pavlovaite, published 2025) mapping incentives across all 27 Member States. In 14 Member States disability benefits sit below the minimum wage and/or unemployment benefit, and fear of losing disability status on reassessment deters work. Thorough evaluations are rare; person-centred, work-ability-focused approaches are found most effective.
Study on alternative employment models for persons with disabilities: Set-up, working conditions and pathways to the open labour market in inclusive enterprises and sheltered workshops – Final report
European Commission (DG EMPL) study by empirica and Sozialhelden (2025) on sheltered workshops, inclusive enterprises and supported employment, with in-depth analysis of eight Member States, 20 good practices and 16 recommendations. Transitions to the open labour market are very low: Germany's sheltered workshops had a 0.35% transition rate in 2019, and only Sweden (Samhall) reaches a significant 6–7%.
European Accessibility Act: Impact Assessment
The European Commission's 2015 impact assessment for the European Accessibility Act proposal found that divergent national accessibility requirements fragment the EU market for accessible products and services, and argued that better accessibility would help persons with disabilities participate more in education and employment.
Designing Disability Insurance Reforms: Tightening Eligibility Rules or Reducing Benefits?
Using a sufficient-statistics framework for the welfare effects of disability insurance, applied to two restrictive DI reforms in Austria, this Econometrica paper finds that tighter eligibility rules triggered higher fiscal cost savings and lower insurance losses, so tighter eligibility rules dominate benefit reductions in scaling back the Austrian DI system.
Striving for an inclusive labour market in Europe: Positive actions and reasonable accommodation to facilitate hiring and employment of persons with disabilities involving employers and employer initiatives
European Disability Expertise synthesis report by Lisa Waddington for the European Commission (2023) covering thirty European countries' employer-directed measures: quotas, tax relief, wage subsidies and reasonable-accommodation grants. Of the thirty countries, only eight have no quota; almost all assessments found quotas had little effect on employment, and where wage subsidies were evaluated their impact on overall employment was mostly limited.
Disability, Work and Inclusion: Mainstreaming in All Policies and Practices
OECD review from 2022 finding that disability employment and poverty gaps remain high: the employment rate of people with disability is 27 percentage points lower than for people without disability, a gap that has remained constant over the past decade, and one in four people with disability live in households with incomes below 60% of the median, compared to one in seven people without disability.