IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fce/doctra/0835.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Working poor in the EU: an exploratory comparative analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Guillaume Allègre

    (Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques)

Abstract

This article explores the determinants of working poverty in the European Union. At the individual and household level, the factors contributing to working poverty differ in importance across countries. Nonetheless, being a lone parent, having low education, having a temporary contract, working part-time or less than full-year, appear to be the most important risk factors. Low pay, under-employment and family structures combine to explain working poverty. At the national level, the correlation between poverty and in-work poverty is strong: countries with low levels of in-work poverty are also the ones which keep overall poverty low. At this level there does not appear to be a dilemma between fighting in-work poverty and overall poverty. The strongest determinant contribution to low in-work poverty is high social spending as a proportion of GDP. The level of spending is more important than the way the spending is done or financed: both the social democratic and the social assurance regimes have good performances in terms of in-work poverty. Women's employment rate, which is generally viewed as being a factor in keeping in-work poverty low, is no more significant when level of social spending is taken into account. This underlines the ambiguous effect of employment on in-work poverty: employment can lift households out of poverty but it can also increase the number of poor workers.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Guillaume Allègre, 2008. "Working poor in the EU: an exploratory comparative analysis," Documents de Travail de l'OFCE 2008-35, Observatoire Francais des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE).
  • Handle: RePEc:fce:doctra:0835
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/pdf/dtravail/WP2008-35.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Filandri, Marianna & Struffolino, Emanuela, 2018. "Lavoratori o lavoratrici povere? Disuguaglianze di genere nel mercato del lavoro in Europa," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue 117, pages 67-85.
    2. Filandri, Marianna & Struffolino, Emanuela, 2019. "Individual and household in-work poverty in Europe: understanding the role of labor market characteristics," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 21(1), pages 130-157.
    3. Andrei, Jean & Saša, Stefanovic, 2011. "Especially vulnerable groups in EU and Serbian labor market," MPRA Paper 35285, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 17 Oct 2011.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
    • J38 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Public Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fce:doctra:0835. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Francesco Saraceno (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ofcspfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.