The Rise of a Latin Model? Family and fertility consequences of employment instability in Italy and Spain

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how unstable employment influences becoming a mother in Italy and Spain. Results suggest that institutional factors foster dynamics of social inequality and hinder family formation. We show that in southern Europe (Italy and Spain), but not in other institutional contexts, the lack of employment stability produces a delay in fertility decision. We attribute this impact of the employment situation on demographic decisions to the sub-protective southern European welfare systems and the insider–outsider labor market configuration, as enhanced by the partial and targeted labor market deregulations of recent decades. In the context of low levels of welfare, unstable employment often comes with persistently reduced entitlement to social and welfare rights, and, therefore, with notable social and demographic consequences. We provide support for this institutional argument by showing that fertility decisions are independent of employment stability in other contexts. Analyses are based on longitudinal data using event history analysis and simultaneous equation models.

Key words:

• welfare and labor market
• employment precariousness and family formation
• insider–outsider divide

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

The appendix for this article can be accessed at 10.1080/14616696.2015.1064147

Notes

1. We consider Italy and Spain, in line with main labor economic and sociological literature, as two institutionally rather similar countries (Bratti and Tatsiramos 2012). We do not enter in a detailed comparison between the two countries on specific aspects, as this is not necessary for our line of argumentation. For the debate see Martín-García (2013) and Naldini and Jurado (2013).

2. Old-age and insider biases strongly overlap: Pampel (1994) suggested that national institutional arrangements influence the intergenerational distributional clash, which becomes harsher in countries where insiders and pensioners lobbies succeed in affecting pension reforms. Esping-Andersen and Sarasa (2002) showed that the age-bias is especially pronounced in Continental and southern European insider–outsider assets, while Scandinavian social democracies are more youth-biased.

3. Saraceno and Keck (2011) spoke about “familialism by default” referring to the Mediterranean situation.

4. We use the terms ‘atypical’, ‘flexible’ and ‘unstable’ as synonyms.

5. Friedman et al. (1994) sustain that rational actors will regularly prefer the conditions that allow them to reduce the level of incertitude they experience in their life course. In this view, prospects for stable and successful careers will have a negative effect on the propensity for parenthood, because achieving a good work position represents a more effective way of reducing personal uncertainty than motherhood – for those who actually have these prospects, that is, highly educated women. Those who face greater uncertainty in their work careers with little chance of improving their situation or with reduced access to other means of reducing uncertainty, that is, the less-well educated, may choose parenthood as a strategy to structure their otherwise uncertain life course (Kreyenfeld 2010) and thus earlier motherhood decisions are a response to uncertain employment.

6. In the Spanish database, minor problems were encountered with starting and ending dates for job episodes. For the 8.03% of women with work experience (as gathered in our subsample), we have no information on the timing of the work career. We signal these cases with a dummy = “no information on the timings of work career”. For approximately 5% of the job spells in the entire sample, only the starting date was available. Thus, the ending date was imputed based on the estimated median duration given the type of contract. Excluding these missing cases from the analyses did not produce significant differences in our results.

7. The analyses refer to unified Germany, but control for Laender fixed-effects. Differences among the Laender go in the expected direction and regard the intercept rather than the effects of employment instability on motherhood. In fact, we do not find any hint that employment instability would play a different role in the two parts of Germany, but differences exist regarding non-employment, which only in the western part speeds up motherhood (results available upon request).

8. The survey was conducted yearly until 1997 and then every two years.

9. As expected, adverse macro-economic conditions – namely, labor market inefficiency and lack of economic growth and job creation, as proxied by high youth unemployment rates – negatively affect the process of family formation. The influence of youth unemployment rates on the transition to the first child is persistently negative in our models, independently of all controls.

10. Controlling for educational enrollment alters the effects of age, education and partnership; however, variables are not collinear.

11. In the Italian database, information is available on education. We estimated models using education both as time-varying and time-invariant covariates. The results do not change significantly. For comparability issues, we used time-invariant covariates for education.

12. Although the overall impact of employment flexibility is rather similar between Italy and Spain, we observe a different set of micro mechanisms at play in the two countries, affecting the speed of the transition to maternity. This underlines the differences between the two countries, which may well be due to different timings in the deregulation processes, different economic and labour markets dynamics, etc. which we cannot analyze in more detail here, given the limited number of cases.

13. Education appears to be of no relevance at all in the USA, whereas the results for Germany are rather similar to those reported for Italy and Spain, with the exception that atypical employment does not affect fertility decisions for any of the educational levels. 

14. We observe that, in Italy, families where the male partner is employed as an informal or seasonal worker (the “other” category) seem to be faster in becoming parents: a result that, most likely, is due to specific characteristics and situations of these persons.

15. The median duration of a spell of “atypical employment” for women is 22 months in Italy and 19 in Spain.

16. In the case of the USA and Germany it is likely that (part) of this faster family formation of the atypically employed is due to a self-selection of less employment-oriented women in secondary labor markets. In Mediterranean countries, where institutional determinants prevail over individual traits, that is, risks for atypical employment are very much institutionally structured, unobserved heterogeneity should be less of an issue. These different compositions of groups are, not least, the result of the different macro-institutional contexts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [grant number StG-263183].

Paolo Barbieri is professor in Economic Sociology at the University of Trento, where he is working on labor markets and welfare in a comparative perspective.

Rossella Bozzon is a postdoc research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. Her research interests focus on labor market careers and life course research in a comparative perspective.

Stefani Scherer is professor in Sociology at Trento University. Her main interest is in social inequality and life course research in international comparison.

Raffaele Grotti is Ph.D. student in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento.

Michele Lugo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento.