The impact of the crisis on unemployment and household income in Italy and Spain

This paper aims at evaluating the effect of the current economic crisis on household income and poverty in Spain and Italy. As data on 2009 income has not been released yet, we have carried out a microsimulation analysis using data drawn for the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions Survey of 2007 and data of the Labour Force Survey of 2009. We propose a technique that is based on the imputation of transition probabilities into different labour market status as calculated on 2009 data on the data for 2007 and income simulation. Our results reveal a 3% reduction in equivalised household income in Spain and a 1.16% reduction in Italy. Despite this difference, for both countries the Gini Index increases from 0.31 to 0.32, suggesting that the Spanish unemployment protection system is more generous than the Italian one.