How can you have 23% Jobless households with 10% unemployment?

Just to be clear on what work intensity means:

The indicator persons living in households with low work intensity is defined as the number of persons living in a household having a work intensity below a threshold set at 0.20.

The work intensity of a household is the ratio of the total number of months that all working-age household members have worked during the income reference year and the total number of months the same household members theoretically could have worked in the same period.

A working-age person is a person aged 18-59 years, with the exclusion of students in the age group between 18 and 24 years.

Households composed only of children, of students aged less then 25 and/or people aged 60 or more are completely excluded from the indicator calculation.
 
Also, to be clear on what Very Low Work Intensity [VLWI] means:


People living in households with very low work intensity are defined as people of all ages (0–59) living in households where the members of working age worked less than 20.0 % of their total potential during the previous 12 months.
 
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So the 23% figure in Irl means:

In 2012-2013, approx 23% of people aged 0-59 lived in households that were classified as VLWI households.


Note that it does not mean "23% of households are classified as VLWI households"
 
Eurostat go further, and provide a breakdown of VLWI across household types.

Proportion of population aged less than 60 living in households with very low work intensity, by household type, 2013

 
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Across all five family types, Irl has much more people aged 0-59 living in VLWI households than elsewhere.

You can see that lone parents have very high rates of VLWI in Ireland.

Combine that with the fact that we have a disproportionate amount of lone parents, and they you can see why we have so many people living in VLWI households.

In this context, I have long called for the abolition of OPFP, and its replacement with something else.

Paying OPFP encourages lone parenthood and leads to more people in VLWI households. Mothers and children suffer as a result.
 


This is an interesting question.

It should be easy to get employment rates for working-age adults in Irl vs the EU.

But what's harder to find is no. of working-age benefit recipients in Irl vs the EU.
 
Protocol said:
This is an interesting question. It should be easy to get employment rates for working-age adults in Irl vs the EU.
Click to expand...

Our friends in the OECD tell us that in 2015 (most recent data available) Ireland had 63.3% of the total working age population in employment, as opposed to 65.6% for the total EU. https://data.oecd.org/emp/employment-rate.htm.

Protocol said:
But what's harder to find is no. of working-age benefit recipients in Irl vs the EU.
Click to expand...

It is but again the OECD's "Government at a Glance" series (always worth a read) tells us that in 2015, 4.1% of the age 15-64 population were in receipt of primary out-of-work benefits, but for secondary benefits (e.g. lone parent) it's 10.8%. [broken link removed]
 
So our employment rate at 63.3% is below the OECD, EU and eurozone averages.

2015 data.

It is also well below the following countries:

DK = 73.5%
DE = 74.0%
UK = 72.7%

There's one main cause of high rates of people in VLWI households.
 
It's 1,964,000 employed in 2015 as per OECD.

That's 63.3% of 3,102,686 working age adults.

If we added 10% to our employment rate, to reach DK or DE rates, that would mean an extra 310,000 people in employment.
 


The Excel file linked to this OECD data is good - thanks very much.

PMU,

look carefully at the figure for lone parents - it is recorded at 0.00 in Ireland for both years.

Odd?????
 
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Hi Protocol

Thanks for that brilliant series of posts explaining it.

I completely missed this point:

Protocol said:
So the 23% figure in Irl means:

In 2012-2013, approx 23% of people aged 0-59 lived in households that were classified as VLWI households.


Note that it does not mean "23% of households are classified as VLWI households"
Click to expand...

It explains a lot about the figures. I took statements like these from the NESC report to actually mean what they say:



It should really be "Why do such a high proportion of adults and children in Ireland live in Jobless households"

This piece from the Executive Summary is also misleading:


Table 1 seems to be the figures for your definition. We are only a bit above the average:


Figure 1 is the main graph:


23% of households are not jobless. 23% of those working in Jobless households are jobless?

Now, I am confusing myself.
 
Protocol said:
PMU, look carefully at the figure for lone parents - it is recorded at 0.00 in Ireland for both years. Odd?????
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It is odd but perhaps understandable. When you look at the subsidiary tables in the spreadsheet they list various programmes, i.e. Jobseekers' benefit; Deserted Wife's allowance (which was replaced by OPFP in 1997); Carers' allowance; Farm Assist (what the hell is that?); and Guardian Payment, but not the OPFP. So that is odd.

One of the reasons I follow the 'Government at a Glance' series is that in my professional life I was vaguely involved in getting public servants to submit statistics to the OECD for this publication. (Not the unemployment / social welfare statistics I wish to emphasise). It really is up to the relevant national agency to submit the info and to submit the correct stuff. So someone appears to have goofed off on the details of the 42,000 approx. recipients of OPFP. I presume they were bunged in with the secondary payments data and not separately identified.
 
"I have always been shocked by the 23% figure and I have never seen an adequate explanation"

The 23% figure relates to 2010! Yet you compare it to average unemployment rates of 2016!!
Why dont you take the unemployment rate of 2010 and then make a comparative analysis?
 
Percentage of people aged 0-59 living in VLWI households

2004 = 12.9
2005 = 14.7
2006 = 12.9
2007 = 14.3
2008 = 13.7
2009 = 20.0
2010 = 22.9
2011 = 24.2
2012 = 23.4
2013 = 23.9
2014 = 21.1

[broken link removed]
 
Unemployment rate, ILO measure, SA, monthly rates - I used June data

2004 =
2005 =
2006 = 4.6
2007 = 4.7
2008 = 6.0
2009 = 12.2
2010 = 13.7
2011 = 14.5
2012 = 14.7
2013 = 13.5
2014 = 11.4
2015 = 9.4
2016 = 7.8
 
Interesting.

The VLWI rate almost doubled between 2006 to 2011 whilst, during the same period, the unemployment rate trebled!
 
TheBigShort said:
Interesting.

The VLWI rate almost doubled between 2006 to 2011 whilst, during the same period, the unemployment rate trebled!
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Why is that interesting? Would you expect them to go up proportionate to each other? I wouldn't. The non-unemployment contributors to VLWI (disability, single parents, carers) aren't as affected by recession - they are what they are regardless of whether there are jobs available. The unemployment rate increased by about 10 points and the VLWI rate increased by about 11 points (probably driven almost entirely by the increased unemployment rate).

[And just mathematically/logically from common sense, it's a lot easier to triple 4.6% unemployment than 12.9% VLWI (39% VLWI would really have us in the manure business...)]
 

Very true. Its not interesting at all, I not really sure why charts for VLWI and Unemployment rates are being compared in the first instance.
 
TheBigShort said:
Very true. Its not interesting at all, I not really sure why charts for VLWI and Unemployment rates are being compared in the first instance
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When did the correct data ever get precedent over an article in a rag like the independent?
Never thought BB was a choirboy for The Redacted One.
 
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