Abstract

Work is no longer a guarantee against poverty risk. The incidence of working poor in employment has grown up in the last years in Italy. Using the Italian section of EU SILC survey, we computed alternative quantifications of the working poor's incidence, based on three different definitions of labour income: hourly wage, monthly labour income, annual labour income. The two latter definitions allow to take into account the role of occupational intensity, i.e. the worked hours and the unemployment spells during the year, in explaining the increase of working poor incidence. We also explore the link between working poor and in-work poverty, which is quite strong when the number of total employed as a ratio to the number of components of the household is low.