Low pay and household poverty in Italy

Chiara Mussida and Dario Sciulli ()

No 635, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: This paper explores how low-pay conditions of household heads and partners affect the risk of poverty in Italy. We assume low-pay work is possibly pre-determined by past poverty status, thus allowing for feedback effects from poverty to future labour market outcomes. Our analysis, based on the 2016-2019 EU-SILC panel data, reveals that low-pay work increases the risk of poverty with respect to high-pay conditions. Notably, the effect of low-pay work on poverty with respect to non-employment (both unemployment and inactivity) differs between household heads and partners. It is greater for the former and smaller for the latter. This stresses the leading role of household heads for income formation in Italy and suggests that their earnings are scarcely competitive with non-labor income, and highlights the added-worker role of partners in the Italian households.We find evidence of feedback effects from poverty to future labor market outcomes, thus indicating the existence of a vicious circle between poverty and poor labor conditions.

Keywords: poverty; low-pay work; feedback effects; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 I32 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2023-635.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2023-635

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).