The Mobility of Italy’s Middle Income Group
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13133/2037-3643_69.277_3Keywords:
middle income groups, mobility, vulnerabilityAbstract
The bulk of economic studies on income distribution focus on the poor and/or on the rich, mostly ignoring those who fall between these two categories. Research on the polarisation of incomes reverses this perspective, considering the middle-income group as a crucial element of analysis. The exploration of the income dynamics of the middle-income group is particularly relevant in the case of Italy. There, it has helped explaining the gap between the empirical evidence of stability in the main distributional indices and the worsening of confidence and expectations among Italian households since the 2000s, already before the crisis. This paper investigates the drivers of mobility of the middle-income group in Italy during the recent recession, with the aim of assessing the changes in the vulnerability of this group to downward mobility. Our findings reveal a general impoverishment of the middle-income group due to the recession and highlight an increasing rigidity of the Italian social structure. Lower entry and exit rates between groups emerge after 2008, possibly due to a growing weakness of the welfare state and the increasing inability of families to cope with unforeseen financial difficulties.
JEL: D31, D63, I32
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