TY - JOUR

T1 - Unemployment sequences and the risk of poverty: from counting duration to contextualizing sequences

AU - Pohlig, Matthias

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/1

Y1 - 2021/1

N2 - Research has consistently shown that unemployment is a strong predictor for income poverty. So far, most studies have focused on the duration of unemployment to account for differences in income poverty. However, this practice may mistreat trajectories which conform less to the norm of continuous full-time employment before unemployment. In this article, I first develop a generalized framework which contextualizes unemployment sequences according to duration as well as timing and order. Second, I apply a sequence analysis to longitudinal data from five European welfare states—Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden—using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. Thereby, I construct a typology of unemployment sequences which includes some non-standard types of unemployment sequences. These sequences contain inactivity, part-time employment and self-employment spells and have an increased poverty risk. Thus, the sequence-based framework and the sequence analysis are able to contextualize unemployment sequences better than the conventional measure of unemployment duration.

AB - Research has consistently shown that unemployment is a strong predictor for income poverty. So far, most studies have focused on the duration of unemployment to account for differences in income poverty. However, this practice may mistreat trajectories which conform less to the norm of continuous full-time employment before unemployment. In this article, I first develop a generalized framework which contextualizes unemployment sequences according to duration as well as timing and order. Second, I apply a sequence analysis to longitudinal data from five European welfare states—Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden—using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. Thereby, I construct a typology of unemployment sequences which includes some non-standard types of unemployment sequences. These sequences contain inactivity, part-time employment and self-employment spells and have an increased poverty risk. Thus, the sequence-based framework and the sequence analysis are able to contextualize unemployment sequences better than the conventional measure of unemployment duration.

KW - Europe

KW - I32 Measurement and Analysis of Poverty

KW - J64 Unemployment

KW - poverty

KW - unemployment

KW - welfare state

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087796616&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1093/ser/mwz004

DO - 10.1093/ser/mwz004

M3 - Article

VL - 19

SP - 273

EP - 305

JO - Socio-economic review

JF - Socio-economic review

SN - 1475-1461

IS - 1

ER -