2022 EISS Conference in Leuven (BE):
“Social Security in Small Jurisdictions - Size does Matter?”

After the wonderful edition of 2021, the European Institute of Social Security hosted its annual conference in collaboration with KU Leuven in Leuven. The conference took place from 22-23 September on the topic of social security in small jurisdictions. Our gratitude goes to Faculty of Law and Institute for Social Law of KU Leuven for their support in putting together the conference.

The conference was followed by festivities in light of the academic retirement of Prof. Danny Pieters, former Secretary General of the EISS.

Registration and Programme

• It is no longer possible to register via the conference website

• Programme

Background

Small states have been ignored in the literature of the welfare regime, though it is likely that they are confronted with specific issues or problems when dealing with social security. Of course, small jurisdictions are very diverse: they can be rich or poor, reflect different legal traditions, and may have many other differences. We will focus on questions that can bring them together, which are explicitly linked to the small nature of the jurisdictions, such as scale disadvantages, limited human resources and infrastructure, the importance of immigration and/or emigration and the difficulties to conclude balanced social security coordination agreements with major emigration and/or immigration countries … . Can we identify problems unique to social security in small jurisdictions as well as ways of dealing with these problems?

With this conference we have the ambition to highlight the challenges small jurisdictions face in their social security systems.