The Rise Of In-work Poverty Is A Complex Issue With No Easy Answer

27th June 2019

It's one of the biggest social changes we've seen in the past 25 years. Poverty, long associated with being out of work and with old age, is now mostly a phenomenon experienced by people who are actually in work or who are living in a household where someone is in work.

Back in the mid-1990s, just under 40 per cent of those in poverty, as measured against the semi-official definition of having less than 60 per cent of median income, lived in working households. Today nearly 60 per cent of those in poverty live in such a household.

Of course, we can disagree about exactly what level of income constitutes a poverty line, so, if you prefer, we can just ask why it is that so many more of those towards the bottom of the income distribution now live in working households. Some work published last week by my colleagues at the Institute for Fiscal Studies throws some fascinating light on this question.

Read the full article at - https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14210