Usefulness and social impact of Minimum Income Schemes against poverty in Spain

Social assistance policies, such as minimum incomes, occupy a marginal place in welfare policies, as they are not linked to real wage contributions. These social protection schemes were developed as solutions of last resort, providing minimum social protection below the poverty line. They have served in several cases the public image of governments and have been used to achieve some political differentiation with other administrations, regional or central, seen as adversaries. In this article, from a public policy evaluation approach, we analyse the evolution, usefulness, coverage, and social impact of the Minimum Insertion Income in Andalusia (RMISA), for the years 2018–2021. We examine its characteristics and impact and compare it with other analogous European social benefits and, more specifically, with other significant Spanish autonomous regional incomes. From the outset, the benefit was designed with a complex application and award procedure, and the regional government provided the programme with a meagre budget. In this period, from 2020 onwards, the implementation of the Minimum Vital Income, by the central government, became the ideal pretext to reduce this budget even further, avoiding a significant mutual reinforcement of both incomes and widening the gap between their application and their theoretical objectives. JEL Clasification: I38 Government Policy; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs, A14 Sociology of Economics, I320 Measurement and Analysis of Poverty