It sometimes seems that with each passing week a handbook on some topic or other is published. Do these handbooks succeed in advancing understanding on a particular topic? Do they even achieve the more modest aim of representing a comprehensive compendium of knowledge in a specific sub-field? Do we – whisper it – need all of these Handbooks? I confess to not always being convinced. But there is undoubtedly a need for this excellent volume on in-work poverty edited by Henning Lohmann and Ive Marx.
As Henning Lohmann and Eric Crettaz note in their chapter on explaining country differences in in-work poverty, while there has been ‘growing body of research on the working poor, evidence is still fragmented and often focussed on single aspects’ (p. 67). This volume contributes towards overcoming this fragmentation, bringing together twenty-five chapters by leading experts in this growing field on a wide range of comparative analyses, country studies and policy issues.
In their Introduction, Lohmann and Marx identify three distinctive features of the volume. The first is that it seeks to cover a wide range of international contexts and perspectives, reflecting the growing concern about in-work poverty internationally. The second is to ‘do justice to the analytical complexity’ of in-work poverty, which they argue requires attention on how in-work poverty is being affected by labour markets, by demographics, and by policy change. Third, while the editors are clear about their own preference for quantitative analysis, they seek to ‘do some degree of justice to paradigmatic diversity’, by including chapters ‘taking different approaches’ to their favoured quantitative approach.
To what extent does the volume succeed against these criteria? Quite well, I would argue. The geographical breadth of the analyses included is impressive. There is a strong comparative focus running through the volume, with many chapters comparing in-work poverty across multiple European nations and (sometimes) the United States. There are then a smaller number of country chapters on the US, Italy and the UK, while there are a full seven chapters representing country studies and comparative perspectives from Latin America, South Africa and Asia.
The analytical complexity of in-work poverty is also on full view here, with several chapters detailing the contingent relationship between an individual’s employment situation and their household’s poverty status. The comprehensiveness of this volume provides the space to interrogate these relationships in quite some detail, but without the volume being dominated by this technical and definitional material: there is an abundance of analysis the incidence of in-work poverty and potential policy responses too.
The third feature, of including differing approaches, is less apparent: this is a primarily quantitative and largely comparative volume; while there are some critical country case-studies, there is, for example, no chapter presenting qualitative data on how in-work poverty is experienced.
The volume has, in my view, a number of significant strengths. First, multiple chapters examine and emphasise the need to consider the joint distribution of individuals’ employment and earnings statuses within households, which brings to the fore gendered employment patterns and their significance in terms of understanding and explaining the incidence of working poverty (e.g. in chapters on low earnings and in-work poverty by Wiemer Salverda and on gender and in-work poverty by Sophie Ponthieux). Secondly, quite a wide range of policy issues are discussed in relation to in-work poverty – wage floors (minimum and living wages), activation, childcare, social assistance, and social security more broadly.
Third, while the analytic focus is primarily comparative and cross-national, a number of chapters include analysis of change over time, both at the country level (e.g. analysis of changing poverty risks by type of employment in a chapter on atypical employment by Jeroen Horemans, and in a chapter on low pay, in-work poverty and economic vulnerability by Bertrand Maître, Brian Nolan and Christopher T. Whelan) and in terms of the longitudinal experience of in-work poverty (e.g. a chapter on in-work poverty dynamics in the UK by Leen Vandecasteele and Marco Giesselmann). Fourth, discussed above, is the comprehensive geographical coverage of the book, which includes not only the more familiar European (and to a lesser extent American) terrain, but includes chapters on Chile, India, South Africa, Israel as well as comparative studies of Latin America and East Asia.
While the volume is thus broad in terms of its thematic and geographical reach, the sections of the book hang together well and the chapters themselves are of a consistently high standard. Given the diversity of topics and contexts, the volume could perhaps have benefitted from a conclusion tying together some of the themes and findings from across the twenty-five analytic chapters, though this would have been no mean feat given the wealth of material contained within it.
Overall, this is a wide-ranging, original and timely collection on a topic of growing of interest. This Handbook will be an essential source for those who seek to understand how and why working poverty differs across nations, and the policy responses that might be employed to tackle it.
