Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

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.