BACKGROUND The vast majority of demographic studies have approached and operationalised the notion of economic uncertainty using snapshot indicators. Hence, the complexity and diversity of individuals' employment careers were largely hidden. We posit that the persistence of joblessness-that is, repeated and close spells of joblessness-represents a crucial marker of economic uncertainty in the realm of fertility (intention) research. OBJECTIVE We aim to explore the association between persistent joblessness of both members of the couple and women's fertility intentions among those who entered employment at least once in the last five years. METHODS We develop an index of persistent joblessness that simultaneously considers individual and contextual labour market conditions. It accounts for the severity of the experience of joblessness, the chances that an individual will escape joblessness, the alleviating effects of the years spent in continuous employment, and the recentness of any joblessness experience. This index is operationalized for Italy by consulting the 2009 Family and Social Subjects Survey. We verify the association between the index and women's fertility intentions among Italian couples, net of a series of confounders. RESULTS Our findings show that the higher the level of persistent joblessness, the lower a woman's fertility intentions. Within couples, we found a gendered association between joblessness and fertility intentions: His joblessness, more than hers, seems to play the decisive role in inhibiting a woman's fertility intentions.
Traditional measures of the persistence of poverty do not devote enough attention to the sequence of spells of poverty. We propose a new class of indices which measures the severity of chronic poverty, taking into account the way in which spells of poverty and non-poverty follow one another along individual life courses. All the years spent in poverty concur with the measurement of the persistency of poverty, albeit with a decreasing contribution provided that the distance between two consecutive spells of poverty becomes longer. Moreover, the distance from the poverty line and the poverty persistence probabilities are explicitly taken into account. A macrolevel index, which allows comparisons across nations and accounts for the mobility in the national income distributions, is also provided and it is used to explain the differentials of persistence of poverty among young European adults.
Italy has a universal health care system that covers, in principle, the whole resident population, irrespective of citizenship and legal status. This study calculates the prevalence of unmet need for medical care among Italian citizens, regular and irregular immigrants and estimates logistic regression models to assess whether differences by citizenship and legal status hold true once adjusting for potential confounders. The analysis is based on two Surveys on Income and Living Conditions of Italian households and households with foreigners. Controlling for various factors, the odds of experiencing unmet need for medical care are 27% higher for regular immigrants than for Italian citizens and 59% higher for irregular immigrants. The gaps by citizenship and legal status are even more striking among those with chronic illnesses. These results reveal the high vulnerability of immigrants in Italy and the need to develop more effective policies to achieve health care access for all residents.
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