Povertà: una prigione senza colpa

The paper focus on the problem of poverty persistence, after the European crisis, and the related worsening of economic mobility: it makes quite a difference whether poverty and low income is a short-term problem or, to the opposite, degenerate in a poverty-trap. We show that for many European countries, poverty persistence hit mainly the young and could become a poverty-trap. We selected the case of the UK, with a widening gap between to upper and lowest income decile, and the case of Italy where poverty persistence in the lowest deciles, during the economic crisis, is associate with a negative probability of transition to higher deciles: it is the beginning of a poverty-trap which can be avoided only with a targeted economic policy. We propose a new measure of absolute poverty, which is highly counter-cyclical: in other words the poor suffered a major blow during the economic crisis, instead of being shielded by a safety net. We show how the real consumption of the families with children was sharply reduced from 2007 to 2013 and, moreover, how they suffered a negative externality, paying “too much” for their housing costs.