Why poverty in Italy is growing when family income rises
Low-income UK households at risk
have to be repaid later with interest.
Critics say this means tens of thousands of people, many of them pensioners, will be saddled with what amounts to a new mortgage on top of their existing home loan. A 68-year-old woman who is still paying off her mortgage and receives SMI contacted Guardian Money to say she isn’t comfortable taking out a government loan, so she is going to reject the offer.
But that means she will have to find the money to replace the benefit. “This is going to cause a lot of hardship for people,” she said.
However, others argue that it’s not the role of UK taxpayers, many of whom can’t afford to buy a home of their own, to subsidize people’s New figures showing family income is on the rise in Italy are further bolstering the case that the country may be in an economic recovery, but the expanding gap between the country’s richest and poorest residents shows the recovery is not helping everyone.
The latest round of macroeconomic figures released by ISTAT, Italy’s National Statistics Institute, show that average family income was up by 1.8 percent to 29,988 euros per year and purchasing power up by 1.7 percent last year compared to two years earlier. Median income rose 2.8 percent in the same period, xinhuanet.com wrote.
But the increase has been far from evenly spread. ISTAT said the top fifth of the population in terms of income enjoyed most of the growth, while the bottom 30 percent of the population was at risk of ‘poverty and social exclusion’. That is up from 28.7 percent the previous year.
Similarly, the percentage of Italians living in poverty rose to 20.6 percent in 2016, compared to 19.9 percent previously. The newest information is among the highest in Western Europe, and is the first time the poverty figure finished above the 20-percent threshold in Italy in more than 30 years.
Most importantly, the gap between the richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent of the country — known as the Gini index — was 0.331 compared to 0.307 for the European Union as a whole.
The Gini index, named for early 20th-century mortgage payments and enable them to acquire a potentially valuable asset they can pass on to their children after their death.
SMI helps homeowners on certain incomerelated benefits pay the interest on their mortgage and the Department for Work and Pensions normally sends the money straight to the mortgage lender. It was introduced after the second world war as a working-age benefit that would offer a short-term lifeline to people who had lost their job or become ill and were trying to get back on their feet.
However, almost 70 years later, many of those who receive it are of pension age and retired, and they are able to claim it indefinitely Italian sociologist and statistician Corrado Gini, measures inequality on a scale between zero and one, with a higher score an indicator of less economic equality. Industrialized countries generally have lower Gini index than poor or developing countries.
“Italy’s economic recovery is still very timid, and it is very uneven,” Andrea Ciarini, a professor of economic sociology in the Department of Social and Economic Sciences at Rome’s La Sapienza University, told Xinhua. “More and more, the middle class is being left behind.”
Among the drivers pushing incomes higher, according to ISTAT, are increases in the numbers of skilled and high-paid self-employed workers, which rebounded in 2016 after falling for several years.
The factors widening the gap between the richest and the poorest are an inflexible labor market, a high value-added tax rate, under-funded social programs, and high unemployment levels among young workers.
Ciarini said that the trend indicating a widening income gap has been in the works for decades in Italy.
“Italy has a very high national debt, but private sector debt has always been low, with much of the debt offset by high savings rates,” Ciarini said.
“But more people have to dig into their savings. That is likely to continue and as it does it will erode the economic health of poor and middle class families,” Ciarini added. while their mortgage is outstanding. That is because pension credit is one of the qualifying benefits. The others include income support and income-based jobseeker’s allowance.
According to the government, there are about 124,000 people receiving SMI at a cost of £205 million a year to the state. Almost half the recipients are of pension age and many have interestonly mortgages.
However, the government said the current setup was unsustainable, so in the summer 2015 budget it announced that from April 2018, SMI would no longer be paid as a benefit. Instead, it will be replaced by a state-backed loan, secured against the mortgaged property. The loans will