Review of macroregularities about investment in social services

Social services and policies are key components of European welfare states and take a prominent position in the social investment approach that emerged in the early twenty-first century (see e.g. Hemerijck (2017) and Verbist (2017)). They (can) have a profound impact on individual lives, behaviours, and achievements by protecting, enabling, and providing the basic preconditions for human development and participation in society (Ciani & Fattacciu, 2025). Social services and policies aim to promote individual and social wellbeing and to protect individuals from economic and social risks at different stages in the life course, thereby also affecting outcomes at the macro-level, be it often in an indirect way, as represented by Coleman’s boat approach in Ciani and Fattacciu (2025). This approach is all the more relevant in the transformative phase that our societies are undergoing. This phase is characterised by large scale, interconnected, and not easily reversible changes in social, economic, political, environmental, and technological spheres (European Environment Agency, 2015). Hence, investment in social services and policies is also important when it comes to fostering an environment in which societies can develop transformative capacities required to navigate through the transformative phase. By providing social services and policies, societies can deal with this changing world by ensuring sustainable wellbeing. Thus, a better and systematic understanding of how the investment in social services and policies in European welfare states impacts key societal outcomes is a necessary endeavour and is an important stepping stone in the SWINS project identifying the macro-regularities of investment in social policies and to prepare the ground for testing their micro-foundation later in the project. To this end, this paper reviews the existing evidence on the relation between investment in social services and policies and sustainable and inclusive wellbeing (SIWB). The review adopts a comparative approach and investigates the relations between (the change of) social investment efforts and key indicators related to different dimensions of sustainable wellbeing. This paper contributes to SWINS’ aim to measure the return of investment in social services and thus highlights to what extent social services and policies are and can be an important driver of sustainable wellbeing. First, a broader concept of sustainable wellbeing is discussed, as well as which indicators are used to measure sustainable wellbeing (Section 2). After that, we give an overview of all different social services and policies that play an important role throughout life, thereby building on the framework of the life course multiplier and discussing the interlinkages between the micro and the macro-level (Section 3). In Section 4 we review the macro-regularities with respect to sustainable wellbeing indicators for social services and policies in general (Section 4.1) and for a selection of social services and policies in particular (Section 4.2-4.6). This selection encompasses on the one hand in-kind interventions (early childhood education and care, education, health care), enabling social policies (active labour market policies) and the emerging domain of so-called green services. Section 5 concludes.