WORKING POOR IN POST-COMMUNIST EU: WHAT CAN SOCIAL POLICY CHANGE?

Poverty research in post-communist Europe has been behind its western counterparts but it is recently catching up. However, research of in-work poverty in the post-communist EU members is still rather scarce. This paper contributes to filling that gap. Using EU-SILC microdata, supplemented by various country-level statistics, this paper has two aims. Firstly, it maps the development of in-work poverty in the post-communist EU and compares it to western countries. Secondly, it identifies factors that may influence the probability of becoming a member of the working poor. Using multilevel regression techniques it reveals that individual factors play a considerably larger role in influencing the In-work Poverty (IWP) than institutions. Additionally, the findings show that there were three institutional barriers which prevented workers from becoming poor before the crisis: parental leave, unemployment benefits and union density. However, these institutions lost their influence during the crisis and still have not restored it after the crisis.