Economic Insecurity in Australia: Who is Feeling the Pinch and How?

Abstract

We produce micro‐level estimates of economic insecurity in Australia using a range of different approaches. Measures are calculated annually from 2001 to 2011 and it is observed that when aggregated, they loosely track the national unemployment rate and GDP growth rate. The insecurity indices are then stratified using a number of demographic variables and it is observed that young, unmarried persons with low educational attainments are more insecure than the general population. Panel data regressions show that these individuals are also more insecure when controlling for various factors including time‐invariant individual‐specific heterogeneity. Further, dynamic models indicate that most individuals have high persistence in insecurity over time.

Is it vulnerability or economic insecurity that matters for health?

“…In general the results conform to findings reported in other works (e.g. Hacker et al, 2010;Rohde et al, 2014, Western et al, 2012 where lower income individuals face higher burdens, although this does not hold in all cases as our income loss measure is disproportionately concentrated amongst richer individuals. 5…”

The self-reinforcing dynamics of economic insecurity and obesity

“…However for persons who do not find safety the health consequences will build up, and thus chronically insecure people can be expected to exhibit continual weight gain. This slow aggregation of BMI scores is consistent with observation and explains why weight gain is usually a little more prevalent in low socioeconomic status subsets of the population (Zhang and Wang, 2004;Wang and Beydoun, 2007;Sundquist, and Johansson, 1998) where there is typically less economic security (Rehm et al, 2012;Rohde et al, 2015). Further these cumulative effects will become more pronounced if there is some feedback effect from bodyweight to risk.…”

Measuring Economic Insecurity Using a Counting Approach. An Application to Three EU Countries

“…There is not yet a consensus on the definition of economic insecurity, even if some common elements may be already drawn from the relevant literature. Insecurity can be understood as the anxiety produced by anticipating future economic losses and the awareness of not being capable of overcoming them (Osberg, , ; Osberg and Sharpe, , ; Hacker et al , ; Bossert and D'Ambrosio, , ; Berloffa and Modena, ; D'Ambrosio and Rohde, ; Ivlevs, ; Rohde et al , , ; Rohde and Tang, ). Starting from this idea, economic insecurity has implications for individual well‐being and should be analyzed beyond inequality and poverty.…”

“…Our main purpose in this paper is to evaluate the level and evolution of economic insecurity in three European countries in recent years (from 2009 to 2016), focusing on its determinants and main changes during the Great Recession. We build a variety of indicators based on a counting approach and follow a comprehensive method put forward by Rohde et al () that allows us to construct an individual measure of economic insecurity that combines past experiences while predicting key future states that are most likely to determine the insecurity felt in the present (Osberg, ).…”