What is your couple type? Gender ideology, housework sharing and babies

BACKGROUND It is increasingly acknowledged that not only gender equality, but also gender ideology plays a role in explaining fertility in advanced societies. In a micro perspective, the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e. the actual sharing taking place in a couple) and gender ideology (i.e. gender equality in attitudes, as proxy for gender equity), may drive childbearing decisions. OBJECTIVE This paper assesses the impact of consistency between gender equality in attitudes and equality in the division of household labour on the likelihood of having another child, for different parities. METHODS Relying on two-wave panel data of the Bulgarian, French, Czech, Hungarian and Lith…

Accounting for Interdependent Risks in Vulnerability Assessment of Refugees

The United Nations’ Vulnerability Assessment Framework (VAF) of refugees encompasses a set of indicators of the living conditions in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan; it assumes the independence among its components. In this paper we maintain the importance to account for existing interdependencies, and provide a definition of vulnerability for high income countries. The proposed “vulnerability scale”, based on the estimated joint risk of social isolation, economic deprivation and bad health, is a useful tool to address interventions toward selected groups of more vulnerable refugees. Analyses are based upon the survey of refugees carried on in Germany in 2016. Germany is the first count…

L’Informazione Statistica per le Politiche Ambientali: Stato e Prospettive

Perceived Value in Tourism: A PLSPM Approach

This paper examines the concept of perceived value in rural tourism referred to the specific context of Sicilian holiday farms. Herein main dimensions composing the rural tourist perceived value (RTPV) are discussed. Using Partial Least Squares Path Modelling (PLSPM) –a statistical technique especially suitable for exploratory purposes with small samples – a theoretical structural model of the multidimensional structure of RTPV is tested and the causal relationships among RTPV and its dimensions (Functional, Convenience, Emotional and Educational) and among RTPV and tourists’ satisfaction and loyalty are explored. Results from a field survey on 350 tourists give a contribution in terms of i…

The Emergence of Women as Main Earners in Europe

This paper conducts a cross-sectional empirical research aimed at documenting the emergence of a new family model characterized by women who earn the largest share of their household income. We show that in Europe, couples with women as the main earner have started to represent a non-negligible share of the population and identify the key characteristics of couples in which women are the main earner in comparison to equal-earner couples and to couples in which men are the main earner. We undertake a comparative approach using micro-level data from the European Social Survey on 19 countries and two time periods (2004 and 2010).

La sostenibilità delle destinazioni turistiche: la misurazione per indicatori

Tourism often has had (and has) detrimental outcomes on destinations but the need and the rele-vance of a sustainable development of tourism was only recently recognised. Sustainable tour-ism is a quite recent concept, derived by the notion of sustainable development; it is usually re-lated to environmental issues and particularly to natural resources waste. Wider definitions are now emerging in the scientific community including, usually, social and economic dimensions together with the environmental one. Although, the intrinsic multidimensional nature of sustain-ability and the high number of stakeholders to be involved in its evaluation (e.g. policy makers, administrators, local resident…

The role of the accumulation of poverty and unemployment for health disadvantages

Health inequality is an important aspect of how advantages and disadvantages are distributed within societies. We extend previous research by considering how trajectories of poverty and employment affect self-reported health among young adults. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, restricting the analytical sample to those who were 25 to 45 year-old in 2005. We calculated the indexes that account for persistence and intensity of poverty and employment on 10-year-long individual-level employment and household-level poverty trajectories. Ordinal logit regression models show that both long-lasting poverty and short periods out of employment are detrimental for men’s health. In con…

Harmonic growth: a new approach to the measurement of countries development

The paper defines harmonic growth as a situation of diffuse well-being associated to an increase of GDP, and proposes a measures of time series similarity between GDP and each one from a set of social and economic indicators of development. Such indexes are then synthesized in order to provide the global degree of harmony in growth inside a country. A first Harmonic Growth Index is based on comparisons between couples of polynomials fitting the series. The second version of the index is obtained from cubic B-splines estimates. With an accurate selection of social indicators, both indexes can also be used to rank countries according to their level of development, offering effective complemen…

La persistenza di povertà tra i giovani europei. Fattori di rischio, persistenza, correttivi

Lo studio analizza i fattori associati alla persistenza di povertà fra i giovani in undici paesi europei. Oltre alle condizioni che spiegano normalmente la povertà e la sua persistenza (avere un basso livello di istruzione, vivere senza un partner, uscire dalla famiglia d’origine ed essere senza lavoro), emerge l’importanza del sistema di welfare nello smussare i principali fattori di rischio cui i giovani sono esposti nel processo di transizione allo stato adulto. Si evidenzia come per i giovani europei l’uscita dalla famiglia d’origine sia uno dei principali fattori di rischio, mentre la maggiore probabilità di sperimentare la povertà persistente da parte delle donne sia dovuta principalm…

A fuzzy approach to multidimensional material deprivation measurement: the case of foreigners living in Italy

This paper provides a new approach to the measurement of multidimensional material deprivation, based on partial order theory and on fuzzy set measurement. The main feature of the methodology is that the information needed for the deprivation assessment is extracted directly from the relational structure of the dataset, avoiding any kind of scaling and not proper aggregation procedure, so as to respect the measurement level of the data. An empirical illustration, using data from a special EU-SILC survey on migrants in Italy, provides a new insight on the material deprivation of foreigners living in Italy

Persistent Employment Instability and Fertility Intentions: The Gender-Specific Effect within Couples in Italy

Our paper adds to the growing literature on the measurement of employment instability and on that on its consequences on fertility dynamics. We argue that many of these studies disregard a crucial dimension of employment instability: its persistence (duration). It is the persistence in an unstable condition, more than the status itself, that may have the most severe consequences on subsequent family choices. In this paper, we propose an index of persistence in employment instability that synthesizes all the information inside the individual sequence of employment statuses in a single number accounting simultaneously for the duration, sequencing, intensity, and labour market circumstances. T…

We made it to Germany … and now? Interdependent risks of vulnerability for refugees in a high-income country

Refugees are perceived as a category of people that are ‘vulnerable’ per se. However, once they have arrived in (high-income) hosting countries and are supported by a welfare state, vulnerability needs to be rethought, as they face new challenges and potential sources of inequality. In this paper, we have measured vulnerability as the probability of experiencing jointly three interdependent risks: social isolation, financial worries and poor health. For this purpose, we estimated a trivariate logit model to evaluate how individual and household characteristics are associated with vulnerability and also made inferences regarding the residual association between pairs of risks, conditionally …

Life satisfaction of refugees living in Germany

Since 2015, Germany has been hosting noticeable incoming flows of refugees and asylum seekers, leading, in 2020, the ranking of European countries and being the fifth in the world ranking for the number of hosted refugees. Despite the quality of life of refugees is expected to be improved in the aftermath of their arrival to Germany, refugees are still facing several problems of integration and economic deprivation (e.g., about 90% are unemployed). Hence, it is a worthwhile exercise to study how satisfied they are with their present life. Using a sample of 3,408 individuals from the German IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees (regarding refugees and asylum seekers who came to the country betwee…

A NEW INDEX OF POVERTY PERSISTENCE

This paper proposes a new indicator of poverty persistence based on a synthesis of the temporal sequences of the years spent in poverty and non poverty, taking into account the order in which poverty spells follow each other. The index is a measure with cardinal properties and it allows not only the ranking of the individuals according to the duration of their poverty experience but also to measure the distance between any two individuals in the population. The index can be built up at individual level and it is also possible to have an aggregated index at any territorial level. Micro data from a longitudinal survey are needed.

MEASURING LONGITUDINAL POVERTY

Traditional measures of poverty persistence, such as “poverty rate” or the “persistent-risk-of-poverty rate”, do not devote enough attention to the sequence of poverty spells. In particular, they do not put enough attention in underlining the different effects associated with occasional single spells of poverty and the consecutive years of poverty. In this paper we propose a new index which measures the severity of poverty in a longitudinal view, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The index is normalized and increases with the number of consecutive years in poverty along the individual poverty profile. The index is su…

Studying poverty over time: an analysis by gender and age in Europe

This paper aims to communicate a new conceptualization of persistent poverty used to build the class of longitudinal poverty indices by Mendola et al.(2011), and to show how these indices could be helpful in analyzing the characteristics of persistence of poverty among generations. The indices are based upon the idea that the longer the sequence of consecutive high poverty gaps is, the worse the situation experienced. Moreover they introduce, via a parameter, the idea that the evaluation of the individual experiences of poverty must take into account the poverty mobility in the society. An empirical application on European Community Household Panel data compare the contributions of each gen…

Assessing the Beneficial Effects of Economic Growth: The Harmonic Growth Index

In this paper we introduce the multidimensional notion of harmonic growth as a situation of diffused well-being associated to an increase of per capita GDP. We say that a country experienced a harmonic growth if during the observed period all the key indicators, proxies of the endogenous and exogenous forces driving population well-being, show a significantly common pattern with the income dynamics. The notion is operationalized via an index of time series harmony which follows the functional data analysis approach. This Harmonic Growth Index (HGI) is based on comparisons between the coefficients from cubic B-splines interpolation. Such indices are then synthesized in order to provide the g…

Assessing satisfaction of tourists visiting Italian museums: eviden from the eWOM

Museum visitors’ satisfaction is a priority asset for those museums aiming at being competitive in the cultural tourism sector. In this study, evaluations by visitor-tourists, left in their reviews on museums on the TripAdvisor platform, are analysed. Through web scraping, we collected comments for twelve Italian museums left during the year 2019. The content analysis focussed on components of the tourists’ satisfaction among Italian and foreign museum visitors, with emotional response, management, and exhibitions emerging as key concepts in museum’s evaluation. Noticeably, some elements emerged as divisive: i.e., they appeared both among less and most satisfied tourist-visitors

What keeps young adults in permanent poverty? A comparative analysis using ECHP

Abstract Previous studies suggest that there are strong differences in the rates of youth poverty across European countries. Rather surprisingly, it is found to be high in Scandinavian countries, and relatively speaking, lower in Mediterranean and Anglo-Saxon countries. This somewhat unexpected finding prompts the question whether the incidence of poverty is an appropriate measure of youth disadvantage. Instead of considering poverty rates we consider the length of recorded poverty spells, taking into account explicitly the temporal sequencing of the episodes of poverty. Using the European Community Household Panel, individuals are classified into different groups of poverty permanence, eac…

La Sostenibilità delle destinazioni turistiche: un approccio per indicatori

How Much Should we Care about Consecutive Spells of Poverty? Proposal of a New Index

Is cross-sectional poverty a reflection of real economic and social disadvantage? Does total number of years spent in poverty provide sufficient information about poverty severity? Recent studies show that in some countries there are good reasons to believe that it is not (see, among others, Mendola et al., 2009). Traditional measures of poverty persistence, such as ‘poverty rate’ (i.e. the number of years spent in poverty upon total number of observations) or the ‘persistent-risk-ofpoverty rate’, do not devote enough attention to the sequence of poverty spells. In particular they are not good enough in underlining different effects associated to occasional single spells of poverty and cons…

Socioeconomic determinants of persistence in poor subjective health

This paper aims at contributing to the constantly growing literature on the dynamics of (self assessed) health. Using the eight waves of the Health and Retirement Study, targeting elderly Americans over the age of 50, we measure persistence in bad health using an index borrowed from the literature on persistent poverty. This new approach, which is totally non parametric in the way it defines the relationship (for each individual and along the time) among years of poor and not poor health, allows to catch some interesting links between the subjective health and several factors such as education, life styles and socioeconomic status that may have a long-lasting influence on an individual’s he…

An analytical review of destination competitiveness´ indicators

The role of indicators in assisting tourism planners and decision-makers in evaluating performances, setting targets and anticipating future scenarios has been widely acknowledged by scholars. The purpose of this study is to provide an evaluation of existing composite indicators of tourism destination competitiveness (TDC) and propose a statistical toolbox/protocol to assess their effectiveness in empirical evaluations. We built the study’s protocol by enriching the OECD technical guidelines to build composite indicators. The protocol contains now 15 criteria used to examine the reviewed indicators, among these two useful quality measures. Ten studies were identified as providing a composit…

Refugees’ perception of their new life in Germany

Since 2015, Germany has been hosting noticeable incoming flows of refugees and asylum seekers and despite the quality of life of refugees is expected to be improved in the aftermath of their arrival to Germany, refugees are still facing several problems of integration and economic deprivation. Using a sample of individuals from the first wave of the German IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, we present some preliminary analyses on their life satisfaction (LS). A gamma glm was estimated to focus on the association among levels of LS and main socio-demographic characteristics as well as post-migration factors. Greater stability (both in the legal and personal sphere) in refugees’ lives is posit…

Women as main earners in Europe

This paper conducts a cross-sectional empirical research aimed at documenting that couples with women as main earners represent a non-negligible share of the European populations today. We identify the socio-demographic characteristics of couples with women as main earners in comparison to couples with men as main earners and couples with equal-earners. We undertake a comparative and cross-temporal approach using micro-level survey data for 18 European countries from the European Social Survey and two years, 2004 and 2010, covering the period before and during the economic crisis.

Una metodologia campionaria per lo studio del turismo nautico. Problemi di stima e implicazioni sulla quantificazione del turismo sommerso

Sicilia: terra di integrazione?

GENDER DIFFERENCES ON POVERTY PERSISTENCE AMONG YOUTH: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS USING ECHP

Understanding youth chronic poverty in South of Europe

This paper investigates chronic poverty among the youth in Southern Europe, which is characterized by very high levels of persistent poverty, and welfare systems which are unable to smooth disparities. The main aim is to investigate on how longitudinal poverty differs in socio-demographic and economic characteristics among the Mediterranean youth. The intensity of poverty over time is measured by a new longitudinal poverty index based on the rationale of cumulative hardship. We tested the effects of many covariates on the incidence and intensity of chronic poverty, controlling for main socio-demographic and economic characteristics, using a ZINB model. The peculiar mix between the lack of e…

Salute dei rifugiati. Risultati di un'indagine

Social Quality: Strategies to Measurement

Imputation Strategies for Missing Data in Environmental Time Series for An Unlucky Situation

After a detailed review of the main specific solutions for treatment of missing data in environmental time series, this paper deals with the unlucky situation in which, in an hourly series, missing data immediately follow an absolutely anomalous period, for which we do not have any similar period to use for imputation. A tentative multivariate and multiple imputation is put forward and evaluated; it is based on the possibility, typical of environmental time series, to resort to correlations or physical laws that characterize relationships between air pollutants.

La competittività di una destinazione turistica

Measuring destination competitiveness and identifying its determinants are strategic goals for pol-icy makers and tourism stakeholders. In order to do so, the availability of valid and reliable moni-toring tools is requested. In this context quantitative measurement tools, such as composite indi-cators, able to account for complexity and providing easily interpretable measures, represent a useful option. Nowadays composite indicators are commonly used for these aims but some criticism is suggested on how this happens. In this paper we provide some definitions of destination competitiveness and focus on related measurement approaches. In particular, supply-side competitiveness is distinguish…

Persistent Employment Instability and Fertility Intentions in Italy

Our paper adds to the growing literature on the measurement of employment instability and on that on its consequences on fertility dynamics. We argue that many of these studies disregard a crucial dimension of employment instability: its persistence (duration). It is the persistence in an unstable condition, more than the status itself, that may have the most severe consequences on subsequent family choices. In this paper, we propose an index of persistence in employment instability that synthesizes all the information inside the individual sequence of employment statuses in a single number accounting simultaneously for the duration, sequencing, intensity, and labour market circumstances. T…

Combining the intensity and sequencing of the poverty experience:a class of longitudinal poverty indices

Summary Traditional measures of the persistence of poverty do not devote enough attention to the sequence of spells of poverty. We propose a new class of indices which measures the severity of chronic poverty, taking into account the way in which spells of poverty and non-poverty follow one another along individual life courses. All the years spent in poverty concur with the measurement of the persistency of poverty, albeit with a decreasing contribution provided that the distance between two consecutive spells of poverty becomes longer. Moreover, the distance from the poverty line and the poverty persistence probabilities are explicitly taken into account. A macrolevel index, which allows …

Youth poverty in Europe.

This research examines poverty among young people aged 16 to 29, across 13 countries of the pre-enlargement European Union. Although young adulthood is known to be a time of uncertainty and vulnerability, there has been little research into the incidence of poverty among young people. This report aims to fill this knowledge gap. More life-changing transitions occur during the young adult years than at any other time in people’s lives. This research looks at how these affect young people’s risks of poverty, including events such as: - leaving the parental home - setting up home with a partner - finishing education - finding (or not finding) a job, and - starting a family. The research compar…

Measuring the perceived value of rural tourism: a field survey in the western Sicilian agritourism sector

Rural tourism constitutes a valuable tool for the sustainable development of many rural areas. This paper examines the concept of perceived value in rural tourism. A quantitative field survey was carried out in some main Western Sicilian holiday farms (agritourisms) during the Spring 2014. A theoretical model of the tourists’ perceived value in this specific context was developed and validated, using a 22-item scale. Using Partial Least Squares Path Modelling a theoretical structural model of the multidimensional structure of the RTPV was tested, assessing intensity and direction of the causal relationships among RTPV and its dimensions. Five dimensions were identified as forming the constr…

The importance of consecutive spells of poverty: a longitudinal poverty index

Traditional measures of poverty persistence, such as ’poverty rate’ (i.e., the number of years spent in poverty upon the total number of observations) or the ’persistent-risk-of-poverty rate’, do not devote enough attention to the sequence of poverty spells. In particular, they are insufficient in underlining the different effects associated with occasional single spells of poverty and the consecutive years of poverty. Here, we propose a new index which measures the severity of poverty, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The index is normalized and increases with the number of consecutive years in poverty along the se…

Sampling in Local Tourism Quantification: Critical Issues and Field Experience

The aim of this paper is to detail some issues relating to tourist sampling by means of three case studies. Tourism quantification issues and solutions will be illustrated in three paradgmatic situations: sampling in a self-contained context with multiple access points (an Island in Aeolian archipelago), tourism in a seaside town, and nautical tourism. In these contexts the issue of building a space-time grid to circumscribe the target population is made more complex by the mobile nature of these populations.

Measuring Vulnerability of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Italy

In recent years, a growing number of forced migrants have travelled to Italy across the Mediterranean Sea. While the number of new arrivals has diminished since 2017, the Italian reception system still struggles to process the high number of applications for international protection. A significant proportion of forced migrants who arrive in Italy end up living in informal settlements, such as occupied buildings, shacks, containers and tented camps. In this study, we assess the vulnerability of asylum seekers and refugees living in informal settlements in Italy, using data from the first nationally representative survey of this population. We compare a count measure of vulnerability with a n…

Ai margini dell'accoglienza. Rifugiati esclusi dal sistema di accoglienza ufficiale

Persistent Employment Instability and Fertility Intentions

Our paper adds to the growing literature on the measurement of employment instability and its consequences on fertility dynamics. Many of these studies disregard that the persistence (duration) in an unstable condition, more than the status itself, may have the most severe consequences on subsequent family choices. In this paper, we propose an index of persistence in employment instability (EINI) that synthesizes all the information inside the individual sequence of employment statuses in a single number accounting simultaneously for the duration, sequencing, intensity, and labour market circumstances. Then, we test its impact on short-term childbearing intentions of Italian couples separat…

Methodological Issues in the Baffling Relationship Between Hepatitis C Virus and Non Hodgkin’s Lymphomas

The association between Hepatitis C Virus infection and B-cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma has been the matter of several studies: they showed disagreeing results with a marked regional variability. In this paper we present a review of the literature, highlighting methodological issues and main statistically critical aspects. Review suggests that studies were often not methodologically well approached. Moreover, we present main results from an original case-control study conducted in Italy, in an area of high endemicity of Hepatitis C Virus infection. In particular, we put attention in selection of a properly matching control group and in the role of age as a confounding variable.

Building composite indicators in tourism studies: Measurements and applications in tourism destination competitiveness

Abstract Composite indicators are useful tools to synthesize and monitor multidimensional phenomena. The aim of this paper is twofold: to offer the methodological foundations to build composite indicators in tourism and to evaluate a set of currently available composite indicators. Tourism destination competitiveness indicators constitute the object of this contribution. Their definitions, concepts and measures are analyzed and their evaluation is performed through the application of an original protocol. The results highlight that several methodological issues still surround the measurement of destinations competitiveness indicators. This paper provides tourism scholars and practitioners w…

Net satisfaction: a different point of view on the measurement of subjective well-being

Starting from the baffling relationship between satisfaction and importance in the evaluation of subjective well-being, this paper presents a new definition of satisfaction useful to build a composite index of subjective well-being. The index is proven on data from European Quality of Life Survey 2007 and compared with two of the standard literature approaches to measure satisfaction taking into account importance weighting.

Poverty Permanence Among European Youth

Previous studies suggest that Scandinavian countries are the ones with the highest rates of youth poverty in Europe. This somewhat unexpected finding prompts the question whether the incidence of poverty is an appropriate measure of youth disadvantage. Instead of considering poverty rates we define here youth disadvantage in terms of the number of periods an individual is recorded to be below the poverty line. Using the European Community Household Panel, individuals are classified into different groups of poverty permanence, each reflecting severity of social disadvantage. Based on these categories we implement a generalized ordinal logit model to assess the various factors associated with…

Some Remarks on Nonresponses in Exit Polls

La stima del turismo non ufficiale: il disegno campionario, la scheda d’intervista ed alcuni primi risultati.

L’obiettivo del presente lavoro è descrivere il disegno campionario, la scheda di intervista ed alcune prime risultanze dell’indagine multiscopo sul fenomeno turistico a Cefalù svoltasi tra luglio e settembre del 2005 ad opera del presente gruppo di ricerca. La scheda di intervista contempera le esigenze conoscitive legate all’ampia gamma di interessi diffusi tra i membri del gruppo, con una attenzione particolare alla quantificazione dei flussi di turismo che sfuggono, per vari motivi, alle statistiche ufficiali (il “turismo sommerso”). Vengono anche presentati alcuni meccanismi di controllo adottati in itinere ed ex post per verificare il processo campionario e l’attendibilità complessiva…

The vulnerability of refugees: Some reflections on definitions and measurement practices

The legal and policy discourse on refugees has been mainly focusing on the labelling of particularly vulnerable persons or groups, while it has neglected to offer reflections on the effects of definitions and assessment practices over the creation of stereotypes and of biases in the identification of beneficiaries of protection. The aim of this paper was to offer some reflections on the how categories of vulnerability defined by international and supranational law are operationalised and implemented in the practice of the vulnerability assessment inside the humanitarian organisations. Our analysis shows that the vagueness of the legal definitions affects the way in which humanitarian organi…

Does the desired well-being matches with the perceived one? A proposal of a new index of subjective well-being at the individual level

The analysis of poverty in Italy. A fuzzy dynamic approach

The commonly used criterion to sharply separate the poor from the non poor on the basis of a poverty threshold appears to be too severe in comparison with the nature of poverty. The latter is multidimensional in its components (domain) and continue in its states (codomain). Moreover an income-based poverty line allows for a remarkable number of spurious transitions below and over that line, which do not correspond to true variations in household’s standard of living. This study starts from the analysis of common (with crisp states) transition matrices; then a fuzzy multidimensional poverty indicator is built. In conclusion, fuzzy states transition matrices synthesize interpretative content …

What is your couple type? Gender ideology, housework-sharing, and babies

AbstractBACKGROUNDIt is increasingly acknowledged that not only gender equality but also gender ideology plays a role in explaining fertility in advanced societies. In a micro perspective, the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e., the actual sharing taking place in a couple) and gender ideology (i.e., attitudes and beliefs regarding gender roles) may drive childbearing decisions.OBJECTIVEThis paper assesses the impact of consistency between gender equality in attitudes and equality in the division of household labour on the likelihood of having another child, for different parities.METHODSRelying on two-wave panel data of the Bulgarian, Czech, French, Hungarian, and Lithuanian G…

What is your couple type? Gender ideology, housework and babies

This paper examines the consistency between gender equality in opinions and attitudes and equality in the division of household labor by building a typology of respondents that combines two indexes for two dimensions of gender equality. The typology identifies four types of couples: gender unequal attitudes and gender unequal housework sharing, gender equal attitudes and gender unequal housework sharing, gender unequal attitudes and gender equal housework sharing, gender equal attitudes and gender equal housework sharing. We assess the impact of the typology on the likelihood of a new childbirth, using two-wave panel data of the Bulgarian, French and Hungarian Generations and Gender Surveys…

Defining and measuring the development of a country over time

This paper introduces the concept of harmonic growth as an extended acceptation of the notion of development, and discusses its measurement via the Harmonic Growth Index (HGI). The growth is seen as harmonic when the behaviour of a benchmark time series, which here is a measure of wealth, such as per capita GDP, is followed by a similar pattern in socio-economic series. Unlike most widely used indicators in the literature, which take into account the measurement of development over a single time, HGI measures the degree to which a social indicator’s time series pattern matches with the GDP’s. The index is a function, ranging in [0, 1], of the coefficients of the uniform B-splines fitted to …

Family networks and refugees’ health conditions. A picture from Italian informal settlements

While the relationships between social networks and health are widely acknowledged in the literature, few of these studies have covered the population of refugees living in makeshift camps. In our analysis of a nationally representative Italian survey of individuals living in informal settlements, we find that many had weak family relations: only 10 per cent had one or more family members in their settlement. The paper analyses the effects of individual social network on two measures of health, and finds that the refugees’ health conditions were associated with both their personal characteristics and the characteristics of the settlement. The results show that more than 50 per cent of these…

Chronic Poverty in European Mediterranean Countries

This chapter investigates the characteristics of chronic poverty among youth in Southern European countries. These countries have the highest levels of poverty in Europe and welfare systems unable to smooth social inequalities effectively. The main aim of this chapter is to investigate on how long-lasting poor among the Mediterranean youth differs in socio-demographic and economic characteristics. The intensity of poverty over time is measured by a very recent longitudinal poverty index based on the rationale of cumulative hardship. We tested the effects of many covariates on the incidence and intensity of chronic poverty, controlling for main socio-demographic and economic characteristics,…

Poverty Persistence Among Youth: A Comparative Analysis

A cohort perspective of youth poverty in the United States

The aim of this paper is to study the degree of poverty persistence of American young adults and its evolution. Using data from NLSY79 and NLSY97, respectively, we compared two cohorts followed along eight years (in the 1980s and in the 2000s) to asses which socio-economic characteristics preserve them to fall in chronic poverty or determine the duration and severity of this detrimental experience.

Is it still too much time indoor and in domestic places? Women's use of leisure time in Italy

Domestic violence in Africa: a glance through the DHS survey

Recent data states that 33 per cent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa are survivors of domestic violence. This work aims at assessing the association between women’s characteristics, their environment, and their history of violence in fifteen African countries. Three kinds of violence were explored: physical, emotional and sexual, each one exerted by the current partner. The data are from Demographic and Health Survey, in which a special module assessed domestic violence in female respondents. Using three independent logistic regression models, we found that witnessing violence of any kind has an effect on having a violent relationship, and while female empowerment is not protective, partners …

Persistent joblessness and fertility intentions

Background: The vast majority of demographic studies have approached and operationalised the notion of economic uncertainty using snapshot indicators. Hence, the complexity and diversity of individuals' employment careers were largely hidden. We posit that the persistence of joblessness - that is, repeated and close spells of joblessness - represents a crucial marker of economic uncertainty in the realm of fertility (intention) research. Objective: We aim to explore the association between persistent joblessness of both members of the couple and women's fertility intentions among those who entered employment at least once in the last five years. Methods: We develop an index of persistent jo…

Short-run and long-run persistence of bad health among elderly

We study the health dynamics among older Americans using ten waves of the Health and Retirement Study following a spell-approach and a regression-based approach. The former is fully non parametric synthesizing the sequences of health status into a Health Persistence Index. The latter approach relies on a Latent Markov (LM) model capturing persistence in poor health by modelling time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. Our results show that only few elders experiences persistently a poor health status. The higher values of the index are consistently observed with the main socio-demo-economic risk factors. Moreover LM model indicates the existence of three unobserved groups differing in their p…

Dalla rilevazione di variabili ausiliarie alla costruzione di indicatori per la quantificazione del turismo sommerso: esiti comparativi

Health and Living Conditions of Refugees and Asylum-seekers: A Survey of Informal Settlements in Italy

Newspapers and humanitarian organisations have long shown that many asylumseekers and other beneficiaries of international protection are forced to live for months or even years in precarious settlements that have sprung up spontaneously throughout Italy. However, there are no official statistics on how many asylum-seekers and refugees in Italy live this way. Our survey, carried out in 2015, is the first national survey of foreign nationals living in these makeshift camps. It aims to build a complete list of informal settlements in Italy and provide an estimate of the population size, characteristics, and living conditions of these settlements, with a focus on health conditions. The conditi…

Women's leisure time in Italy. Time constraints and geographical gradients

La competitività turistica e la sua misura tramite indicatori composti

MATERIAL DEPRIVATION AMONG FOREIGNERS IN ITALY

In all European countries, migrant populations tend to have worse living conditions than native; this is particularly true for those born outside the EU. This paper proposes a new way to look at the relative living conditions of foreigners by looking at non-monetary (or ‘direct’) indicators of material deprivation in Italy-a country characterized by the presence of a wide range of nationalities. To examine differences in economic integration of foreigners, the paper documents deprivation differentials across groups of foreigners. In particular, we measure differences in material deprivation between groups of foreigners once we control for the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of…

Some Regional Gaps in Social Exclusion in Italy. Evidence from EU-SILC.

In questo lavoro si presentano alcuni primi risultati di un’analisi sull’esclusione sociale condotta a livello regionale utilizzando le informazioni provenienti dalla prima onda italiana del nuovo panel europeo EU-SILC. La prima onda dell’indagine e’ disponibile solo da pochi mesi e nella seconda onda sono gia’ stati introdotti cambiamenti metodologici che non consentiranno l’immediato raffronto dei dati. Risulta comunque interessante, anche per i futuri sviluppi longitudinali, una prima analisi delle differenze territoriali dell’esclusione sociale e dei fattori che espongono i soggetti a rischio di poverta’ ed esclusione nelle venti regioni italiane. Il gradiente Nord-Sud resta ancora pres…

The contribution to poverty persistence of children, adults, and the elderly: some empirical evidences from eleven European countries

This paper aims to communicate a new conceptualization of persistent poverty used to build the class of longitudinal poverty indices by Mendola et al. (2011), and to show how these indices could be helpful in analyzing the characteristics of persistence of poverty in different age groups. The indices are based upon the idea that the longer the sequence of consecutive high poverty gaps is, the worse the situation experienced. An empirical application on European Community Household Panel data compares the contributions of age groups to the overall index in some European countries and allows to identify the strata of population more exposed to poverty persistence.

The importance of consecutive spells of poverty: a path-dependent index of longitudinal poverty

In this paper we propose a new index of individual poverty in the longitudinal perspective, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The Poverty Persistence Index (PPI) is based on all the pairwise distances between the waves of poverty. The PPI is normalized and it assigns a higher degree of (longitudinal) poverty to people who experience poverty in consecutive, rather than separated, periods, for whom the distances from the poverty line are larger along time and moreover, when the worst years are consecutive and/or recent. We also propose an aggregate index of persistence in poverty (APPI) in order to measure the distribu…