Transmission of precariousness in Belgium: intergenerational analyses (1991-2001)

Jean-Pierre Hermia, Université catholique de Louvain
Thierry Eggerickx, Université Catholique de Louvain

In Belgium, despite the improvement of the quality of life, social exclusion continues to exist and inequalities even increase. The main objective of this paper is to identify the determinants of intergenerational transmission of precariousness, at an individual level and on the whole population living in Belgium. In order to meet this purpose, we explore the intergenerational change, forwardly (from 1991 to 2001), in order to understand under which conditions precariousness is transmitted or eliminated from one generation to the other. Do children reproduce the positions, behaviour and trajectories of their parents, or do they on the contrary, develop a divergent social mobility? What trajectories do the children of immigrants follow? Methodologically speaking, we identify social groups by classifying individuals according to their position in the fields of education, employment and housing, and typify these groups in terms of level and nature of precariousness. Thus we end up with a social ladder going from the most deprived groups accumulating all handicaps (no job, low educational level, bad housing …) to the groups cumulating all social assets. Highly informative data sets are used, on the basis of coupling census data (1991, 2001) and National Register (from 1991 to 2001) at the individual level, yielding their exhaustive, individual and longitudinal nature. To identify sociodemographic determinants (age, sex, type and size of the household in 1991 and 2001, nationality, migration, level of precariousness of the municipality), polytomous logistic regression models are used.