Benefit receipt thus tends to be a transitory phenomenon, and ‘recipients’ and ‘non-recipients’ should therefore not necessarily be considered as two very distinct groups. Let the entry rate be defined as the number of individuals who receive benefits in the current period and who did not receive benefits in the previous period as a percentage of all non-recipients in the previous period.21 Analogously, the exit rate is the number of benefit leavers as a share of all benefit recipients in the previous period. Figure 7 plots year-to-year entry and exit rates for the eight countries, again using different panels to distinguish between types of data source.