The Gendered Nature of Poverty in the EU: Individualized versus Collective Poverty Measures

ABSTRACT

Due to the adoption of the household as a unit of analysis, researchers have failed to identify accurate measures of women's income poverty. This study proposes an individualized measure of European poverty to highlight gender differences in the economic crisis. Employing data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for the period 2007–12, it compares the household-based at-risk-of-poverty rate (ARPR) and the individualized financial dependency rate (FDR). The study shows that the gender gap in poverty in Europe is considerably higher when computed through FDR. Indeed, since the ARPR constitutes a proxy of the household's average conditions, it levels down gender inequalities within the household and also variations in individuals’ incomes over time. Only more detailed data collection on intrahousehold resource sharing will possibly allow the development of more precise and realistic indicators of women's and men's risks of poverty and financial dependency.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• poverty
• crisis
• risk of dependency
• individualized income
• European Union

JEL Codes:

• B54
• I32
• J16

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors acknowledge the helpful comments of three anonymous reviewers for improving the structure and content of the paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Fabrizio Botti is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Perugia, Italy. He holds a PhD in theory and history of economic development from the LUISS University of Rome. He has been a member of different research projects and worked as a consultant for government bodies and European and international institutions in the field of financial and social exclusion, with a special focus on microfinance.

Marcella Corsi is Professor of Economics at Sapienza University of Rome. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Manchester, UK. She has worked as consultant for the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and for several Italian institutions. Her research activity mainly focuses on issues related to social inclusion, social protection, and income distribution (often in a gender perspective). She was recently one of the core coordinators of the European Network of Gender Equality Experts (ENEGE), from 2012 to 2015.

Carlo D'Ippoliti is Associate Professor of Economics at Sapienza University of Rome, where he teaches international economics in the Department of Statistics. He holds a PhD in economics from the J. W. Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main (jointly with Sapienza University of Rome). He was a member of the coordinating team of EGGSI, the European Commission's Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion, Health and Long-term Care, from 2008 to 2011.

Notes

1 This approach is true provided one ignores children's gender and the child poverty issue. Indeed, as Marcella Corsi and Kristian Orsini (2002) show, child poverty in Europe is a topic that deserves special but separate attention.

2 Eurostat, Households Statistics – LFS Series, http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do. Croatia joined the EU in 2013.

3 EU-SILC is a harmonized household survey coordinated by Eurostat, the statistics agency of the EU. The EU-SILC database is the official source of statistics on income and social exclusion in the EU, used to monitor progress toward the Europe 2020 objectives. It covers private households but not collective households, people in institutions, or persons without a fixed place of residence. For each year, EU-SILC contains representative samples of the populations of the member states of the EU as well as of other participating countries; Eurostat provides the appropriate sample weights to draw inferences at the EU level. For more information on EU-SILC, see Anthony Atkinson and Eric Marlier (2010).

4 The 2010 cross-section of the EU-SILC survey contains a special module on “Intra-Household Sharing of Resources.” This was an experimental section of the questionnaire, administered in full in some EU member states only, while other countries administered a subset of questions. The diffusion of such survey modules must certainly be encouraged in all population surveys, and specifically it is hoped that they become an integrated component of the yearly EU-SILC survey. However, given the one-shot, experimental nature of these data, their quality and reliability has not yet been fully tested. Accordingly, we leave a thorough analysis of these data for further research.

5 Eurostat adopts a “modified OECD scale,” whereby the first adult in each household counts as 1, each adult after the first counts as 0.5, and each child (that is, every person under age 14) as 0.3.

6 See Carolyn Vogler (1998) for a deeper understanding of the literature on the links between money, power, and inequality within marriage.

7 For a comprehensive overview, see Meulders and O'Dorchai (2011).

8 In most cases these will be single-adult households. However, other households contribute to producing gender-differentiated ARPRs too: for example, same-sex couples, different-sex couples living with an elderly parent, three adults living in a same household, and so on. By contrast, as noted earlier, children's gender is usually unacknowledged.

9 Indeed, in most European countries, relatives or cohabiting partners have a legal obligation to subsidize each other's consumption. In this case, financial dependency corresponds to income poverty only if the other household member(s) do(es) not comply with their obligation, or if they lack a sufficient income too.

10 See for example, Robert Skidelsky (2013) for an analysis of power and class in the current crisis, or Alberto Botta (2014) and Carlo D'Ippoliti (2014) on the relevance of international diverge in incomes within the Eurozone.

11 Namely, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain; that is excluding Latvia, which only joined the EZ in 2014.

12 Since the average size and composition of the households in which men and women live are slightly different, as shown in Table A1 in the supplemental online appendix, it is expected that different equivalence scales may result in slightly different gender gaps in poverty (Anne Case and Angus Deaton 2003). Robustness checks are available from the authors upon request.

13 Note that among individual-level incomes the database provided by Eurostat does not contain information on incomes from private pensions for Denmark and on sickness benefits for Italy. Notice also that for some individuals in some years certain forms of incomes, such as incomes from capital or self-employment, may be negative.

14 Results for the previous years (not qualitatively different) are presented in Table A2 in the supplemental online appendix.

15 From this point of view, the official notion of ARPRs computed for single parents (to which European policymakers often refer) is misleading because it may suggest that such indexes measure the risk of poverty among single parents, whereas in fact they measure the risk of poverty of all family members in single-parent households, that is, counting their children.

16 The same trends are even more pronounced in the EZ (as shown in Table A3 in the supplemental online appendix), where women's financial dependency even shrank in absolute terms with respect to its pre-crisis level, respectively by -0.7 p.p. in the EZ and -1.7 p.p. in the GIPSI countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy). According to aggregate data published on Eurostat’s website, a reduction in women’s ARPRs with respect to the pre-crisis level appears too, starting from 2013. The corresponding microdata had not been released yet, at the time of writing the present work.