LabFam seminar series: In-Work Poverty in Europe. Trends and determinants in longitudinal perspective
Speaker: Stefani Scherer, University of Trento
Employment remains among the most important factors to protect individuals and their families from economic poverty. However, recent years have witnessed an alarming increase of in-work poverty (IWP), thus of being poor notwithstanding employment. This paper investigates trends and determinants of in-work poverty in Europe, using EU-SILC data for the period 2004-2015. The contribution is threefold. First, we provide an analysis of the risk and the persistence of IWP for different social groups and household employment patterns and discuss potential implications for social stratification dynamics. Second, we look into the (causal) dynamics of poverty and test for the presence of genuine state dependence (GSD) and the role of unobserved heterogeneity in shaping the accumulation of economic disadvantages over time. Third, we adopt a comparative perspective across countries (and time periods) analysing how different institutional features affect exposure to and dynamics of economic disadvantages. We show that one income is often no longer enough to keep families out of poverty and thus confirm the importance of a second earner, and the need to have at least one non-low-pay sources of income. This is particularly true for Europe’s South and for the less privileged social groups. We find no evidence for GSD, which comes with important implications to combat poverty in terms of activation policies, rather than through transfers. Finally, notwithstanding different levels of exposure to and “stickiness” of IWP, the drivers turn out to be pretty similar across European countries.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Stefani Scherer is a full professor of Sociology at the University of Trento (Italy) and member of the Center for Social Inequality Studies. She holds a PhD from Mannheim University (Dr. phil). Her main research interests are inequality and social stratification processes in international comparative perspective, the analysis of life courses and and family and labour dynamics. She has been working in several large-scale international comparative projects and currently directs te PhD programme in Sociology and Social Research at University of Trento.