Table 7. Disability status and in-work poverty rate
In-work poverty rate
Total
No Disability
6.6%
86.9%
Disability
9.5%
13.1%
Seeing, Even When Wearing Glasses or Contact Lenses
8.4%
6.1%
Hearing, Even When Using a Hearing Aid
7.9%
3.1%
Walking, Lifting or Bending
8.3%
11.7%
Using Your Hands to Hold, Grasp or Use Objects
8.5%
4.6%
Learning, Concentrating or Remembering
10.1%
4.8%
Communicating, Mixing with Others, or Socialising
10.1%
3.8%
Disability
Difficulties
Source: IDI 2019. Notes: In-work poverty rate as defined in Section 3.
4.6 Household structure
Table 8 presents the in-work poverty rate differentiated by household structure. 22 The lowest rate is
observed for households composed of a couple without children (4.8 percent), followed by a couple
with child(ren) (6.3 percent) and single adults (6.4 percent). Households which are comprised of two
or more families or single-parent households have elevated rates of experiencing in-work poverty (at
9.6 percent and 12.3 percent, respectively). It is necessary to point out that while the in-work poverty
rate is high for two or more family households, this type of household structure only accounts for
6.6 percent of all working households. In contrast, single-parent households make up one-tenth of all
working households. A high in-work poverty rate for single parents (relative to other forms of
household structure) is consistent with the experience in other countries (e.g., Nieuwenhuis &
Maldonaldo, 2018).
Intuitively, it is expected that the number of workers in a household will have some impact on the
likelihood of experiencing in-work poverty for the household. Therefore, we further break down the
in-work poverty prevalence for couples (with and without children) and two or more family
households. The effect is substantial: while the in-work poverty rate for couples with children and
only one adult working is 13.5 percent, this number drops to 1.9 percent when there is more than
one adult working. Here, it is necessary to remember that working status is still defined as in Section
3, where the threshold is based on whether the adult is earning positive wages or salaries for at least
seven months of the year. A similar result is evident when viewing the same sub-group analysis for
couples without children (11.6 percent versus 1.2 percent, respectively). Finding a substantive impact
on the likelihood of experiencing in-work poverty if a household has more than one adult working is
also consistent with the international literature on the topic (Gutiérrez et al., 2011).
One explanation for having only one worker in a household with children might be the presence of
small children. This finds some support in the data: for single-parent households and two or more
family households with children, we find that the in-work poverty rate is elevated when there is a
child under the age of five compared with these household types that do not have a child under age
For completion, we also included households with related and unrelated people (‘Other multi-person household’) but do
not discuss their findings further.
22
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