Towards a Better Understanding of Poverty in the Italian Labour Market

During the last century poverty was mainly associated with unemployment status. Over the years, changes like the globalization process and policies to increase labour market flexibility led to a weakening of labour market institutions and the consequent worsening of workers’ socioeconomic conditions, to the naissance of the working poor class. The literature does not provide a unique definition of working poverty, but several definitions can be obtained by combining the labour market dimension with different poverty definitions. While “in-work poverty” is the EU indicator to detect working poverty in the labour market, it has several limitations because of its hybrid nature: it considers both the sphere of work of the individual and the family dimension. Relying on an advanced version of the 2019 IT-SILC survey dataset, the objective of this study is twofold. First, we propose an alternative measure considering territorial and sectoral disparities to have a better understanding of the low-wage employment in the Italian labour market. Second, we investigate the determinants of each type of working poverty explored and their potential coexistence.