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We want to thank everyone who commented on earlier versions presented at conferences, and we are happy to hear your thoughts!

Further research should improve knowledge on country-specific dynamics, particularly on the interaction between employment and social protection and how it affects poverty outcomes. Another challenge is to improve the anchored poverty measure to account for enduring trends in median income.

Our results can enrich the ongoing debate on the European Union’s social target indicator and provide further insights for the developments of alternative poverty thresholds.

When using the anchored at-risk-of-poverty rate among the active-age population as the dependent variable, the association between employment and poverty becomes substantially stronger – up to four times higher than when using the floating poverty line.

However, the most important factor in this regard proves to be the change in the median incomes! Thus, a large part of the story is how the distribution of incomes, and not only the situation among the poor population changed.

Furthermore, the expansion of part-time employment, measured both on individual and household levels as a form of non-standard work added to a blurred relationship and to disappointing poverty trends.

The poverty trends would have been more encouraging during economic upturns if new jobs were distributed more favorably across households and if poverty risks among the jobless wouldn’t have increased.

So why don’t EU (and many country)-level descriptive statistics reflect this relationship after all? We suggested four mechanisms that blur the relationship, and our analysis provides empirical evidence in support of each of these mechanisms.

Using decomposition analysis and macro-level regressions on #EUSILC data for years 2004 to 2017, we find a consistent, negative relationship between employment (individual and household levels) and relative income poverty. This challenges previous findings and concerns of social policy experts.

This figure shows trends in employment (left axis), low work intensity and poverty (right axis) for the EU-27 average (UK included), from 2004 to 2017 (in %). @fdzgml.bsky.social @eu-eurostat-mirror.bsky.social

Consistently high EU-average poverty rates, despite rising employment, continue to generate debates about their relationship and the drivers of poverty rates.