Four megatrends — technological transformations, globalization, climate change, and demographic changes — are reshaping labor markets, redefining opportunities and risks, and posing new challenges for welfare states in the EU. The WeLaR project aims to fill knowledge gaps about these processes by pursuing two main goals:
(i) providing a comprehensive and comparative diagnosis of the effects of these megatrends on labor market risks and challenges for welfare states, and
(ii) developing policy recommendations to adapt welfare states to these changes.

WeLaR contributes to the EU's goal of promoting inclusive growth, fair distribution of productivity gains, and boosting economic and social resilience. To measure the effects of these megatrends, we account for the interactions between them and disentangle their impacts on labor supply, labor demand, and labor market allocations, which are also shaped by institutions. We pay particular attention to groups that often face higher labor market risks, such as women, young workers, people in atypical jobs, or in-work poverty. In developing policy proposals, we combine simulations with lessons from recent welfare state interventions and social innovation experiments, while also accounting for the political economy of reforms. We use an interdisciplinary approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods and adopts a cross-country perspective covering the entire EU, which allows us to understand the role of country-specific institutional settings in the effects of megatrends and challenges for welfare states. To ensure the relevance of our policy ideas, we engage in extensive consultations and set up feedback loops with stakeholders, which complement and validate the quantitative and qualitative studies. These stakeholder consultations help us to develop concrete policy proposals aimed at achieving resilient, inclusive growth. We deliver research papers and policy briefs, and to maximize WeLaR's impact, we disseminate the lessons learned and policy proposals to policymakers, stakeholders, and the public.