While the benefit can now be received by jobless people without any employment record, this has not made benefits more accessible or more generous as these individuals had access to social assistance (paid at similar rates) before the reform. Social assistance provisions (SA, Annex Table A4) have remained largely unchanged, although benefit levels in some countries have not kept up with earnings growth so that social assistance recipients are likely to have slipped further down in the income distribution. However, SA programmes are often administered at a regional or local level, resulting in considerable variation in legal rules or guidelines that are difficult to capture in these summary tables. Regional or local authorities may also provide supplementary programmes on top of those which are nationally co-ordinated (e.g., General Assistance in US States, see Gallagher et al.,