Who Benefited Most from the Reddito di Cittadinanza? Evidence on Poverty and In-Work Poverty in Italy

Fernanda Mazzotta, Lavinia Parisi and Adama Touray
Additional contact information
Fernanda Mazzotta: Department of Economics and Statistics - University of Salerno - Italy and CELPE
Lavinia Parisi: Department of Economics and Statistics - University of Salerno - Italy and CELPE
Adama Touray: University of The Ghambia

No 176, CELPE Discussion Papers from CELPE - CEnter for Labor and Political Economics, University of Salerno, Italy

Abstract: Social cash transfers have been expanding across Europe, though Italy has been slower to adopt such measures. In recent years, however, Italy has introduced several transfer schemes to address rising poverty and social exclusion—most notably the Reddito di Cittadinanza (RdC), recently replaced by the Assegno di Inclusione (ADI). This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of cash transfers by evaluating the effect of RdC on absolute and relative poverty incidence and gap, as well as in-work poverty. Using data from the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) for 2020 and 2022, we apply descriptive statistics, a probit and tobit analysis to assess changes excluding and including the RdC. Our findings show that RdC significantly reduces both absolute and relative poverty but has no significant effect on in-work poverty. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that the impact of RdC varies across different population groups.

Keywords: Government Policy; Probit; Absolute poverty; In-work poverty; social benefits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.celpe.unisa.it/uploads/rescue/784/1048/176-dp.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:sal:celpdp:021732

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CELPE Discussion Papers from CELPE - CEnter for Labor and Political Economics, University of Salerno, Italy via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 - Fisciano (SA), ITALY. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roberto Dell'Anno ().