# Why do more  Irish people live in jobless households than in the rest of the EU?



## Brendan Burgess (18 Aug 2016)

*
In 2009, 23% of Irish people between the ages of 0 and 59 lived in a jobless household. The equivalent figure for the EU -15 was 11%. The next highest was the UK at 13%.*

*What this means *

I have used the figures for 2009, as they have been the subject of detailed studies by the ESRI and NESC and so there is a lot more detail available about them. They are based on the CSO's SILC (Survey of Income and Living Conditions) published in 2010, but the information was collected in 2009.

While the figures are for 2009, the figures for 2014 are very similar.  We still had twice the European average of  people living in jobless households.

It includes everyone from the age of 0 to 59. So children are included. Anyone from 60 upwards is excluded, whether they are working or not.

While the principal cause of joblessness is unemployment, people are also jobless due to home duties, illness and being full-time students.

A jobless household is defined as one where the average time worked in the last year by adults of 18 or over was less than 20%.  So a person who is living on their own who worked for one month last year, was a jobless household. A couple where one person worked full-time, and the other did not work at all, was not a jobless household.  A couple where one person worked full-time and had a non-working wife and adult student living with them, was not a jobless household, as the average time worked was 33%.

*What this does not mean 
*
It does not mean, as my article suggested, and as many other reports have suggested "that 23% of households are jobless". The 23% refers to the number of people living in jobless households.  I have not been able to find any figures for jobless households.

*Caveat *
These figures are based on the SILC. The Central Statistics Office now says that these overestimate the level of people living in jobless households.  I discuss this later in this thread.


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## Brendan Burgess (18 Aug 2016)

*Why do more Irish people live in jobless households than in the rest of the EU? *



Adapted from Watson et al.,:  Work and Poverty in Ireland


Generally speaking, the higher the rate of joblessness, the higher the rate of people living in jobless households. In simple terms, if everyone were working, there would be no children living in jobless homes. So the higher adult joblessness rate in Ireland leads to a higher number of people living in jobless households.

If a woman has a job and her husband is jobless, that household is not jobless. If a person living on their own is jobless, then they are automatically living in a jobless household. In Ireland, we have a lower proportion of jobless adults living with other adults in employment, so this raises the total number of people living in jobless households.

But the huge difference between Ireland and the rest of the EU 15 is the fact that 56% of adults in jobless households have children living with them. It's less than half that in the EU 15. In other words, most jobless adults in the EU 15 do not have children living with them. This brings down the number of people living in jobless households.

This last issue is accentuated by the fact that where an Irish jobless adult living in a jobless household has children living with them,they have more children living with them than the average EU.

*How might 42% joblessness result in 23% living in jobless households?*

I have tried to come up with a model to show how the figures for Ireland might result in 23% of people living in jobless households. I have made many assumptions to convert 42% into 23%.  I don't know how realistic those assumptions are. This area is worthy of further investigation. If a similar exercise were done for the EU average, we might learn something very significant.


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## Brendan Burgess (18 Aug 2016)

*Why do we have a higher rate of jobless adults in Ireland? 


*
Extracted from Figure 3.4 in ESRI report


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## Brendan Burgess (18 Aug 2016)

Here are the SILC data for 2008 and 2014, courtesy of Poster Protocol

In 2014, twice as many people aged 0 - 59 were living in jobless households in Ireland than were living in jobless households in the EU 28


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## Brendan Burgess (18 Aug 2016)

*Proportion of population aged less than 60 living in households with very low work intensity, by household type, 2013*
(Extracted from Eurostat, courtesy of Protocol)


I am not 100% sure what this tells us. 

I think it is that in Ireland, 52% of single people with dependent children are living in jobless households but only 29% of EU 28 single people with dependent children are.


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## Brendan Burgess (19 Aug 2016)

The ESRI has published more recent figures and have used a different definition of joblessness.

People living in jobless households in 2014





Only Ireland and the UK have more children than adults living in jobless households.

The definition of joblessness is that used in the context of the EU Labour Force
Survey (EU-LFS): the share of persons under the age of 60 in households where
nobody is in employment. The ILO definition of employment
sets a low threshold, since even as little as one hour at work in the reference week
would be enough to define a household as ‘non-jobless’ or ‘working’. However, in
practice, there are very few working households where the only employment is a
very small number of hours by one adult.

The SILC definition is:
‘Very low work intensity’ is defined as being in a household
with a work intensity level lower than 20 per cent of potential working time. Essentially, this is equivalent to a household where no adult has worked full-time or part-time during the year.


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## Brendan Burgess (30 Jun 2017)

Any update on these figures? 

With unemployment down to 6%, I would expect the numbers of those living in jobless households to have fallen. 

Brendan


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## Brendan Burgess (30 Jun 2017)

OK, I have found these figures:
http://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-macip/macip15/ai/

So, in 2015, we were still about twice the rest of the EU.


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## Protocol (1 Jul 2017)

Note that we have a structural and cyclical problem of low activity and employment.

What that means is even if the UNR is 6% or less, we will still have very high rates of VLWI.

Why?

We have more households headed by people categorised as disabled / caring / home makers / unemployed than other countries.

In other countries, many poor people have some market income.

Here, average market earned income in the poorest decile is about 10 euro per week, I.e. zero for most people.


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## Protocol (1 Jul 2017)

Note that although the welfare system is fairly good at reducing poverty, the poverty rate before the State intervenes is really, really high.

50% of people would be in relative income poverty before State intervention, reduced to 16% after taxes and transfers.

Why is the pre transfer rate so high?

There is an endogenity in the system.

The welfare State that is fairly good at reducing poverty is itself partly to cause for the very high rates of pre-transfer poverty.


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## Brendan Burgess (3 Jul 2017)

Hi Protocol 

That is a very good point.  

Because we have such high welfare rates in Ireland, people choose not to work.  

If you reduced the welfare rates, more people would work and we would reduce the level of poverty before welfare. 

Brendan


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## Brendan Burgess (3 Jul 2017)

Protocol said:


> We have more households headed by people categorised as disabled / caring / home makers / unemployed than other countries.



What about single parents? 

Jobless households in Ireland seem to have more children than households where someone is working. 

Brendan


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## Brendan Burgess (4 Oct 2017)

I thought it would be interesting to compare these rates with the rates of unemployment in other EU countries in 2015.


We had bang on the average unemployment rate, but twice the level of people living in jobless families. 

Greece had 25.2% unemployment but fewer people living in families depending  on social welfare

Brendan


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## Purple (4 Oct 2017)

Hi Brendan,

Have you come across any statistics on inter-generational welfare dependency?


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## Protocol (4 Oct 2017)

Yes, what we have in Ireland is more a *joblessness *problem, rather than an *unemployment *problem.

Soon we will have 6% unemployment, maybe 130,000 people.

But there are 265,000 people on the Live Register.

And there are hundreds of thousands more working-age adults not active.

Our employment rate is 65%, well below the top rates of 75% achieved in some other countries.


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## Protocol (4 Oct 2017)

Purple said:


> Hi Brendan,
> 
> Have you come across any statistics on inter-generational welfare dependency?



I've never seen such data, or else it's difficult to find.


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## Protocol (4 Oct 2017)

If you want to know how many working-age adults are on welfare, see here:

http://www.welfare.ie/en/Pages/Annual-SWS-Statistical-Information-Report-2015.aspx


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## Sophrosyne (4 Oct 2017)

Purple said:


> Hi Brendan,
> 
> Have you come across any statistics on inter-generational welfare dependency?



I found this:

*[broken link removed]*


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## TheBigShort (4 Oct 2017)

Sophrosyne said:


> I found this:
> 
> *[broken link removed]*



Just a cursory look through, it looks very detailed and informative. Fair play.


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## Protocol (16 Oct 2017)

Provisional 2016 data for VLWI is now available

See p3-4 here:

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/docume...P-EN.pdf/d31fadc6-a284-47f3-ae1c-8212a581b0c1

It's 19.2% in 2016.

To be clear, that's 19.2% of persons aged 0-59 living in households with very low work intensity (<20%)

As usual, our rate is by far the highest.

The Swiss rate is 5.5%.


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## Protocol (16 Oct 2017)

Our 2016 provisional VLWI rate is higher than Greece, and a good bit higher than Spain.

During Aug 2016 the UNR were as follows:

Greece = 23.5%
Spain = 19.3%
Ireland = 7.9%

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/docume...P-EN.pdf/be6fb31a-cc00-44fa-9944-39b4616ebe81

So our UNR was approx one-third of the Greek UNR, yet we have more people living in VLWI households than Greece.


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## Brendan Burgess (19 Oct 2017)

The CSO says that only 11% live in jobless households 

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2017/1019/913594-proportion-of-jobless-falls-in-q2-cso/


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## Protocol (27 Nov 2017)

Seamus Coffey, UCC, has another blog post about high rates of VLWI:

http://economic-incentives.blogspot.ie/2017/11/very-low-work-intensity-by-household.html


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## Protocol (27 Nov 2017)




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## Protocol (27 Nov 2017)

Seamus Coffey concludes that out high rates of VLWI are not due to household composition.

We have high rates across all household types.


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## Protocol (9 Apr 2018)

2016 VLWI rates down to 18.2% of the pop, aged under 60.

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/WDN-20180402-1?inheritRedirect=true&redirect=/eurostat/news/whats-new


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## Niall56 (9 Apr 2018)

The European Commission has been on Ireland's case in relation to this for several years, particularly through the European Semester process.  Each year, Ireland would usually have a Country Specidfic Recommendation (CSR) that referenced this. This explains, in part, whiy Ireland published an Actional Plan on Jobless Households (https://www.welfare.ie/en/pressoffice/Pages/pr250917.aspx) back in September 2017.

2017 CSRs - https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/inf...ns-commission-recommendations_-_ireland_0.pdf - see paragraph 12 and CSR 2 and the end of the document.


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## Protocol (6 Dec 2018)

2016 data on VLWI is available:

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-macip/macip17/ai/#indicator_7

2016 = 18.2% of pop under 60 live in VLWI households, highest in the EU.


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## Protocol (11 Feb 2019)

2017 data on VLWI is now available.

For the 11th consecutive year, we lead the EU in the share of people 0-59 living in VLWI households:

https://twitter.com/seamuscoffey/status/1094990982444134407


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## NoRegretsCoyote (11 Feb 2019)

It is quite extraordinary that one in two lone-parent households does not have an adult in employment.

Yes, childcare in Ireland is expensive but many of these households have only one child, and many more have teenagers who don't need childcare out of school.

The economy is close to full employment so it can't be blamed anymore. This is mainly an issue with the tax-benefit system.


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## Purple (12 Feb 2019)

We have very high rates of social welfare. That means it constitutes a higher proportion of household income. Is this more a reflection of that?


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## NoRegretsCoyote (12 Feb 2019)

Purple said:


> We have very high rates of social welfare. That means it constitutes a higher proportion of household income. Is this more a reflection of that??



If you have jobseekers, one-parent family payment, housing benefits, and medical card there is not much difference between working and not working. If your children are young you don't actually have to be seeking work either!

Granted, you retain housing benefits and medical card on your return to work, and also certain other benefits for a period.

I am not sure that we can fully say that it is not a compositional issue. 23% of households with children in Ireland are lone-parent families. I can't find equivalent data but this would strike me as high in an EU context.


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## Purple (12 Feb 2019)

NoRegretsCoyote said:


> I am not sure that we can fully say that it is not a compositional issue. 23% of households with children in Ireland are lone-parent families. I can't find equivalent data but this would strike me as high in an EU context.


Sure, but we know that a significant proportion of those are not really lone parent families but are just using that status for welfare purposes.


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## NoRegretsCoyote (12 Feb 2019)

Purple said:


> Sure, but we know that a significant proportion of those are not really lone parent families but are just using that status for welfare purposes.



Not really. These statistics are based on Census data, not what people tell DEASP.

Individual census returns cannot be supplied (by law) to any other state agency.


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## Purple (12 Feb 2019)

NoRegretsCoyote said:


> Not really. These statistics are based on Census data, not what people tell DEASP.
> 
> Individual census returns cannot be supplied (by law) to any other state agency.


People aren't going to lie to Welfare and not lie on their Census form.


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## valery (12 Feb 2019)

In some areas, a lot of “brothers”
are around when enumerators call to collect the census.


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