Ravazzini, Laura

2018-11-29, Ravazzini, Laura, Suter, Christian

Currently, the debate of national statistical offices and scholars working on poverty is on how to include wealth in the classical measure of income poverty. Holding the income-poverty threshold fixed, some studies show that wealth-corrected poverty rates of the elderly are much more affected than those of the rest of the population. In addition, the decline in poverty rates for the elderly is higher when the value of the household’s main residence is included than when only non-housing wealth is taken into account. However, as the main residence is difficult to sell to foster consumption, it remains questionable whether this component should be added in the measurement of the risk of poverty. Difficult choices that remain to be made in the creation of a composite measure of poverty based on income and wealth are not only which components and which poverty threshold should be used, but also which methodology to aggregate income and wealth and which equivalence scale to adjust for different household members should be applied. This contribution focuses specifically on this last issue of equivalence scales highlighting how this methodological choice changes the risk of poverty among the elderly. The analysis is run with CH-SILC 2015 and on its specific module on wealth. Results show how methodological choices change the risk of poverty for different age groups in a significant way.

2018-6-1, Simona, Jehane, Ravazzini, Laura

At the beginning of the 2000s, Switzerland went through two global recessions: the Dot-com crisis and the Great Recession. Even though it experienced milder effects compared to its European neighbours, Swiss unemployment increased considerably compared to its status quo. This paper aims to explore the resilience of vulnerable groups to these economic downturns using both objective (income poverty and material deprivation) and subjective (wellbeing and satisfaction with the financial situation) indicators of quality of life. To analyse how quality of life evolved since the early 2000s, we use a longitudinal database: the Swiss Household Panel. When both objective and subjective indicators were used, our results suggest that the dot-com crisis had a stronger negative effect on vulnerable groups. This was particularly true with regards to single parents and large families who experienced a marked decline when assessed using objective indicators. Disadvantaged groups during the first crisis reacted in different ways during the second crisis. Some groups (the unemployed, the low-educated and the solo self-employed) experienced some scarring effects; others were resilient and continued with their normal trends (migrants and the young) or registered an improvement in their conditions (single parents and large families). Single parents are the group that performed better during and after the Great Recession according to both objective and subjective indicators.

2017, Suter, Christian, Beycan, Tugce, Ravazzini, Laura, Odell Korgen, Kathleen

Poverty, the social question of the 19th century, is still one of the most pressing global issues both in the economically advanced, affluent societies of the global North and in the developing countries of the global South. Since the emergence of social problems and deviance as sociological concepts and fields of study in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, poverty has been a focus of concern. Other social phenomena labeled as social problems or forms of deviance (like violence, crime, alcoholism and drug addiction, divorce, family breakdown, suicide) are often considered to be directly linked to, and caused by, poverty. As with other phenomena treated as social problems, research on poverty has typically been applied and policy-oriented, i.e., pragmatic and solution-driven, often related to reform efforts and social policy measures. The diverse sociological perspectives on poverty, therefore, have emerged in specific national, regional and global policy contexts. Furthermore, poverty research often has a strong empirical focus, which is demonstrated by the fact that some of the first comprehensive sociological surveys dealt with poverty issues. Theoretically, diverse approaches have been developed to address poverty, and there is no consensus on the exact definition and conceptualization of poverty. Poverty research, finally, is a field of interdisciplinary research. Sociological perspectives on poverty, therefore, have emerged from a discourse among scholars of sociology, social work, economics and political science. Based on these considerations, the chapter is organized as follows: The first section presents the pioneers of classical sociological poverty research. The second section deals with the different poverty concepts and measurement debates that emerged during the early postwar period of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The third section focuses on the issue of poverty policy. The fourth section looks at contemporary sociological perspectives on poverty in the era of globalization. Finally, the last section summarizes the main trends in sociological poverty analysis over the past decades and points to the challenges for future research.