Poverty in Italy

This Report disseminates estimates based on the renewed Household Budget Survey, that is the result of a long testing period. As deep changes have been introduced in every stage of the process, it has been necessary to reconstruct the time series of the main poverty indicators since 1997 (see attached tables). Time comparisons can be made only using reconstructed data included in this Report and in the attached tables. No comparison can be made using previously disseminated data.

Being sample estimations, the relative and absolute poverty estimations are affected by sampling error: small differences can be not statistically significant.

Main results

In 2014, the absolute poverty incidence was equal to 5.7%, whereas the relative poverty to 10.3%. Taking into account the sampling error, the absolute and the relative poverty phenomenon was stable (in 2013 they were respectively 6.3% and 10.4%) in all geographical areas: 4.2% and 4.9% in the North, 4.8% and 6.3% in the Centre, 8.6% and 21.1% in the South and Islands areas. The relative poverty threshold, for a two-member household, was equal to 1,041.91 Euros (about 10 euros less compared with 2013 threshold).

In the South and Islands area, in the small municipalities the poverty incidence (9.2% for absolute and 23.7% for relative) is almost twice the incidence observed in the metropolitan areas (5.8% and 12.3%); in the North, it is the opposite (3.9%  in the small municipalities and 7.4% in the metropolitan areas for absolute poverty and 4.9% and 7.6% for relative).

Poverty incidence among households with all non-national members (23.4% for absolute poverty and 28.6% for relative) is higher than the incidence observed for households with all national members (4.3% and 8.9%).

Absolute poverty decreased among households with all national members (from 5.1% to 4.3%) and households living in the small municipalities of the South and Islands (from 12.1% to 9.2%); signals of decrease are also registered among couples with two children (from 8.6% to 5.9%), households with reference person 45-54 years old (from 7.4% to 6%) or job seeker (from 23.7% to 16.2%), where there are, compared to 2013, a lot of employed or retired. Also the relative poverty incidence decreased for households with reference person a job seeker (from 32.3% to 23.9%) and for households living in small municipalities of the South and Islands (from 25.8% to 23.7%), in contrast with the increase of the relative poverty incidence in the big municipalities of the same geographical area (from 16.3% to 19.8%).