Time and Income Poverty Measurement. An Ongoing Debate on the Inclusion of Time in Poverty Assessment

This article aspires to foster the debate around the methods for measuring time and income poverty. In the last fifteen years a few studies (Dorn et al. in RIW, 2023; Harvey and Mukhopadhyay in SIR 82, 57–77, 2007; Bardasi and Wodon in FE 16, 45–78, 2010; Zacharias in LEIBCWP. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1939383 , 2011; Merz and Rathjen in RIW 60, 450–479, 2014) attempted to measure multidimensional deprivation including time poverty in the definition. Some of them (Bardasi & Wodon in FE 16, 45–78, 2010; Harvey & Mukhopadhyay in SIR 82, 57–77, 2007; Zacharias in LEIBCWP. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1939383 , 2011) put unpaid work–and, therefore, gender inequalities in the division of work–at the center. Despite the fact that the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) was first presented more than a decade ago (Zacharias in LEIBCWP. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1939383 , 2011), the measure was always employed in reports and never empirically discussed in an academic article. Here I want to fill this gap in the debate by comparing the LIMTIP to the other measures and by applying it to a new case–Italy–furthering the exploration around the linkages between gendered time allocation, employment patterns and household wellbeing in a country characterized by an extraordinary low women’s participation in the labor market and an equally extraordinary wide gender gap in unpaid care and domestic work.