L'ACCESSO ALL'ABITAZIONE DI RESIDENZA: UN'ANALISI MULTILEVEL SULLE FAMIGLIE ITALIANE

Objectives. Income inequalities depend on a large range of components, which influence living conditions of private households. Not all these elements are strictly monetary, and non-monetary components sometimes can be even more important than monetary ones. While international literature has devoted considerable attention to the study of distribution, relevance and inequalities concerning monetary income, the same cannot be said for its non monetary components. Despite this lack of attention in the literature, non monetary components often influence dramatically living conditions of private households. One of the most important component of non-monetary income is imputed rents from owner-occupied housing. The main objective of this article is to evaluate the impact of income advantages deriving from owner occupied housing (from now on IR) on income inequalities of Italian households. Methods. Inequality indices measures considered are: Generalized Entropy and Atkinson class, Gini coefficient and percentile ratio. The analysis was carried out using the data set SILC for Italy on the European Statistics on Income and Living Condition collected for Italy from Istat (the Italian National Institute of Statistics). The data set are referred to year 2004 and consider information regarding income and living condition. Results. The analysis show larger income inequalities between groups, once considered IR. In particularly, main differences emerge comparing owner with loan or mortgage and without it with renting households. In the meanwhile, introducing IR causes reductions in income inequalities within groups. If we analyse the distribution of household type, the introduction of IR produces a decrease in income inequality for all household types. Such a generalized decrease determines, as a consequence, an increase in the inequality between groups (from 11% to 16%). Conclusions. The analysis of income distribution in term of classes of age shows an increase in income inequality between age groups for classes of age including elderly people. This result concern the incidence of owners in those classes of age.