IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-01301803.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Employment and the Working Poor

Author

Listed:
  • Jérôme Gautié

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Sophie Ponthieux

    (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE))

Abstract

While the bulk of the working poor - and the poor - live in developing and emerging countries, it is in wealthy countries, where there are almost no working poor according to the World Bank absolute poverty threshold, that working poverty has been construed as a specific social issue. This reflects that, in rich countries, working poverty is considered as a paradox: those who work (enough) should be able to avoid poverty. Yet working enough is not systematically sufficient to escape poverty. But in the first place, both the notions of "working" and "poverty" raise conceptual and measurement issue. The chapter starts with a look at the diversity of statistical definitions which reflects both conceptual issues and national specificities in the labor market functioning and social protection systems. It then proposes an assessment of the factors impacting on working poverty both at individual and household level, before turning to public policies aimed at "making work pay" to reduce poverty – including minimum wage, inwork benefits and activation policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Jérôme Gautié & Sophie Ponthieux, 2016. "Employment and the Working Poor," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-01301803, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-01301803
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-01301803. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.