Here is the summary explanation, which I still am trying to get my head around
1 Why is the Very Low Work Intensity Rate So High in Ireland?
Very low work intensity occurs when the working-age adults in a household spend
less than one fifth of the potential working time actually at work over the reference
year. Working-age adults are those aged 18 to 59, excluding students under age 25.
The VLWI indicator is one of three measures of being at risk of poverty or exclusion
(along with at-risk-of-poverty and severe material deprivation) for the purposes of the
EU 2020 strategy. Ireland has a much higher rate of very low work intensity than any
other European country. In 2010, the rate was 23 per cent in Ireland, compared to 13
per cent in the next highest EU country, the UK.
There was a sharp increase in very low work intensity in Ireland following the start of
the recession in 2008 – sharper than in the other EU countries – but the rate had
been high in Ireland even during the boom years of 2007 and earlier. The VLWI rate
in Ireland in 2005 was 15 per cent compared to an average rate of 10 per cent in the
EU 15.
Part of the high level in Ireland is explained by the high level of joblessness among
the working-age population. In 2009, Ireland had the highest European level of
economic inactivity at 42 per cent of the working-age population. However, this
inactivity rate on its own is not enough to account for the exceptionally high rate of
very low work intensity in Ireland. For an explanation of this, we needed to look as
well as the living arrangements of inactive working-age adults. If jobless adults in
Ireland are less likely to live with someone who works and more likely to live with
children compared to jobless adults in the EU generally, this would contribute to a
much higher rate of very low work intensity than we would expect based on the adult
joblessness rate alone.
Indeed a detailed examination of the 2009 EU-SILC data showed that in Ireland
fewer inactive working-age adults lived with someone who was at work than in other
EU countries. In Ireland, only about one half of jobless working-age adults live with
someone who works – one of the lowest rates in the EU. Additionally, in Ireland the
majority of adults in VLWI households lived with children (56 per cent) and the
average number of children in these households is among the largest in Europe
(1.8). Since the work intensity of the adults is assigned to all children in the
household in calculating the overall VLWI rate, the fact that jobless adults live with
children means that the impact of joblessness is multiplied by the number of children
living with the jobless adult.
Overall then, we need to take account of individual economic activity, household and
family structure and the impact of the recession in order to understand
the exceptionally high VLWI rate in Ireland in 2010.