Funder: Jobless Households in Australia has been funded by the Australian Family and Community Services Department (FACS).
Staff: Paul Gregg and Susan Harkness
Worklessness is a key reason for welfare dependence and is often associated with poverty. In this section we explore the changing relationship between individual and household measures of worklessness. The rise of the workless household for given levels of employment in the economy is one of the main reasons for increasing welfare dependence over the last twenty years or so. This research addresses the issue of generating measures that allow the changing relationship between individual and household measures of worklessness to be decomposed to facilitate understanding of the forces at work. Then international comparisons are explored to understand why what explains the wide variation in countries performance The rise of the workless household for given levels of employment in many economies is one of the main reasons for increasing welfare dependence over the last twenty years or so. This research is being undertaken in conjunction with the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE and with the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. A draft paper is available.
Lone parents are one of the key groups of workless, and often poor households, in many countries. The last thirty years saw dramatic increases in the employment rates of married/co-habiting mothers in the UK. Yet the employment rates of lone mothers were lower in the early 1990s than in the late 1970s, at just under 40 percent; and 25 percentage points lower than those of married mothers. In 1997 the incoming Labour government initiated a series of policy reforms aimed at reducing child poverty. A key element of their strategy was a move towards increasing employment rates among families with children. This research evaluates how this package of policy reform impacted on lone parents employment.
Susan Harkness has examined the employment dynamics of lone parents using panel datasets from the Longitudinal Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) and the Family and Children Survey (FACS). Since New Labour came to government in 1997 a stream of policy initiatives have been targeted at getting lone parents into work. This work suggests that these policies have been relatively effective and that that lone parents are now as successful at finding jobs as single women with otherwise similar characteristics. However the rate at which lone parents exit work remains substantially higher than for non-lone parents. The exit rate is particularly large for new job entrants, with around one quarter of lone parents who find a job in any given year being out of work one year later.
