Suchergebnisse

Today there is widespread agreement on the urge of adopting conceptual frameworks and evaluation tools that allow to include a variety of aspects of human life in evaluating people's living standards, even at the highest levels of policy making (Stiglitz et al., 2009). While there is no consensus on which specific life domains should be taken into account, the arguments in favour of a broadening of the informational basis for poverty analysis are cogent: low consumption surely is at the heart of the concept of 'poverty' but a number of other domains – like poor human health, limited access to education and powerlessness – are systematically concerned by inadequate living standards (Ferreira and Lugo, 2013). This study hypothesises that the application of a theoretical framework for the reconceptualization of multidimensional poverty as a distributive justice question can be used to (i) address the need for multidimensionality in poverty assessment while minimizing the degree of arbitrariness with which normative choices are often made; and (ii) explain changes in living standards in highincome countries and inform policy makers in a more effective way compared to a unidimensional poverty framework. In Chapter I, we thoroughly review theories and metrics in support of multidimensional poverty analysis, with a particular focus on counting methods and axiomatically derived poverty indices. We highlight the advantages of applying a methodology that enables us to study the distribution of multiple deprivations that simultaneously affect the individuals and identify a new family of poverty measure (Rippin, 2010, 2012a, 2015) that can serve our purpose. In Chapter II, we study the possibility of using conceptual instruments offered by contemporary theories of social justice to address a multidimensional poverty question for high-income countries. We then develop a theoretical framework inspired by John Rawls' theory of justice (1971, 1999, 2001) to reconceptualise multidimensional poverty analysis, which enables us to frame an ethically sound and publicly justified empirical assessments of people's living conditions in constitutional democracies through the application of a Constitutional Approach to dimensions selection. In Chapter III, we contextualize the research in the European framework, reviewing the history and the state of the art of multidimensional poverty analysis for Europe and Italy and identifying weaknesses and possible room for improvement in poverty measurement approaches currently in use. Chapter IV concludes with an investigation on the joint distribution of multiple deprivations in Italy based on EU-SILC cross-sectional data from 2004 to 2013. Two main factors tell the story of deprivation in Italy: age and geography. Deprivations follow a clear pattern through the different stages of life: the youth are threatened by unemployment and economic insecurity, while the elderly report more deprivations in health conditions and educational attainment at once. Geographically, multidimensional poverty estimates confirm the existence territorial disparities already accounted for by official monetary poverty measures, but highlighting remarkable exceptions, confirming that well-informed multidimensional estimates are able to generate non-trivial results. The study of the phenomenology of multiple deprivations in Italy shows that poverty breadth is higher in the South, as well as poverty intensity; conversely, inequality among the poor is widespread in the North, especially in north-western regions. During the past ten years, multidimensional poverty has steadily decreased until 2010 and it started increasing without a clear pattern afterwards. A deterioration in decent work and health conditions has mainly contributed to this change of pattern, while education and living environment conditions have improved across time. Comparing ISPI figures to official statistics on poverty will allow us formulating possible explanations about what are the factors to which different indicators are more likely to be sensitive. We conclude suggesting that a generalization of this study to assess multidimensional poverty at European level can make an interesting area for further research.

Transnational parents are migrant mothers and fathers who have at least one child left behind in the home country. Despite their non-negligible prevalence in many destination countries, scarcity of data on the topic has caused a lack of attention to this phenomenon in both policy and scholarship. In particular, little is known about how the interplay between migration and family relations at a distance affects the individual well-being of both migrant parents and their left-behind children, especially in a European context. This article evaluates the subjective well-being of migrant couples currently residing in Italy who have children left behind, compared with childless migrants and with migrant parents living with their children in Italy. Multivariate logistic regression applied to individual-level data from Istat's Survey on Social condition and integration of foreign citizens, 2011–2012, shows that transnational parents experienced lower levels of self-rated health compared with migrants with different family statuses and that the well-being loss associated with transnational parenthood is strongly gendered. Controlling for individual characteristics, socio-economic conditions, the presence of minor children, and migration background, our analysis demonstrates that men's subjective wellbeing did not vary based on their family status while transnational mothers experienced significantly lower well-being compared with childless migrant women. Our research suggests the need for adopting a transnational approach to migration starting from data gathering, for instance through the design and implementation of multi-sited and retrospective surveys.

This paper evaluates multidimensional poverty in European countries introducing two main novelties compared with the previous literature: first, the dimensions of poverty are selected on the basis of the shared values included in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; second, the whole space of feasible weights is used to summarise the multidimensional information, in order to remain agnostic about the importance given to the different deprivations. Using data from four waves of EU-SILC, the methodological innovations introduced here have allowed to produce a family of measures that capture the individual probability of being multidimensionally poor. Individual probabilities are then used to analyse the within and between distribution of multidimensional poverty in ten countries. Finally, they get combined with the generalised Lorenz dominance techniques in order to derive socially preferred distributions with the minimum load of value judgments. The novel methods proposed in this analysis allow to move from a dual definition of poverty, where poor and non-poor individuals are classified in a mutually exclusive context, to a continuous measure of deprivation, which allows to capture both the extensive and intensive margin of multidimensional poverty.