Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Birinci İktisat ve Toplum Kongresi, Ankara, Türkiye, 6 - 07 Aralık 2023, ss.40
Employment is often regarded as a key to getting out of poverty. However, having a job is not
always sufficient to escape from being poor. In-work poverty is a prevalent phenomenon in many
countries nowadays. This paper seeks possible explanations for working poverty by using the at
risk of poverty or social exclusion (AROPE) definition of Eurostat and taking Turkey as a case
study. For this purpose, it first measures AROPE among the working population utilizing the
Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC) for the year 2022 and finds that 21.95 per cent of
the working population in Turkey are poor. Considerable heterogeneity in poverty rates is observed between sectors. For instance, while more than 35 per cent of the workers in the construction,
electricity, and agriculture sectors are poor, this ratio is less than five per cent in finance and insurance activities. There are also significant differences in poverty risks between regions. Intraclass
correlation coefficient (ICC) indicates that 14 per cent of the variation in the probability of being
poor or not is explained by regional effects at the NUTS-2 level. Therefore, correlates of in-work
poverty are investigated through a multilevel logistic regression analysis where both the individual and regional level characteristics are considered. In these estimations, job sectors are controlled
to reveal within-sector effects. Preliminary findings show that public employment, social security
registration, and higher years of schooling are associated with a lower probability of working poverty, while household dependency raises this risk. Furthermore, compared to the self-employed,
employers are much less likely to be poor, whereas casual employees and regular employees are
more vulnerable to poverty. Finally, it is found that while an increase in regional GDP per capita
lowers the poverty risk, a rise in regional unemployment rate and Gini exacerbates it.