Understanding youth chronic poverty in South of Europe

Abstract

This paper investigates chronic poverty among the youth in Southern Europe, which is characterized by very high levels of persistent poverty, and welfare systems which are unable to smooth disparities. The main aim is to investigate on how longitudinal poverty differs in socio-demographic and economic characteristics among the Mediterranean youth. The intensity of poverty over time is measured by a new longitudinal poverty index based on the rationale of cumulative hardship. We tested the effects of many covariates on the incidence and intensity of chronic poverty, controlling for main socio-demographic and economic characteristics, using a ZINB model. The peculiar mix between the lack of effective state institutions and a strong presence of families explains why many factors, which usually are strongly related to poverty, do not have an important role here. A strong inertial effect is due to the ranking of the household in the income distribution. Italian youth has the worst performance.