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The Suburbanization of Poverty: Homeownership Policies and Spatial Inequalities in France
Laurent Gobillon, Anne Lambert, Sandra Pellet
This article examines the role played by assisted loans in the access to homeownership and in the residential segregation of low-income households in France. During the 1996–2006 period, no-interest loans affected 1.4 million households and were the main policy tool favoring homeownership. We rely on French housing surveys (INSEE) and administrative records on no-interest loans (SFGFAS) to compare the position of social groups in the housing market before and after the introduction of no-interest loans. We show that, in a context of increasing housing prices, no-interest loans have limited the exclusion of lower- and middle-class households from the new-build housing market, especially outside the Paris region. Nevertheless, households with no-interest loans tend to relocate to peripheral areas characterized not only by a lower proportion of professionals and managers relative to central areas, but also by lower access to public transportation, the childcare system, high schools, and job opportunities. Moreover, in-depth interviews at the individual level suggest that low-income households had no clear perception of the social and physical disconnections they would experience when purchasing their new homes.

Monetary Poverty Indicators in Feminist Research: Overview and Outlook
Irène Berthonnet
Feminist criticism has now extensively documented how the official monetary poverty indicators—the World Bank’s International Poverty Line and Eurostat’s at-risk-of-poverty rate—underestimate the poverty of women. This article reviews two alternative monetary poverty indicators introduced by feminist research. A discussion of these indicators highlights their contribution to general thinking on ways of quantifying monetary poverty without underestimating the poverty of women. More specifically, feminist research on these indicators systematically shows that to accurately measure poverty, even in strictly monetary terms, it is impossible not to take account of the power relations within households. To address this issue, two avenues of research are proposed for devising a new indicator of monetary poverty.


Unemployed Adults Forgoing Healthcare in France
Iñaki Blanco-Cazeaux, Liliana Patricia Calderón Bernal, Justine Chaput, Marika Gautron, Inès Malroux, Guerschom Mugisho, Aurélien Dasré, Julie Pannetier
In 2016, almost 1 in 3 unemployed people in France reported having forgone healthcare for financial reasons in the 12 previous months, a proportion twice as high as that observed in the working population. Drawing on data from the 2016 Health Barometer, this article analyses the factors behind this forgoing of care. A comparison between unemployed and employed people shows that while forgoing healthcare among unemployed people is partly linked to their economic and social characteristics, being unemployed itself also has an effect. Moreover, the sociodemographic inequalities in forgoing healthcare observed among employed people are smaller among the unemployed population. Last, for unemployed people, having complementary health insurance remains key to making full use of healthcare services.

Classifying Individuals by Their Participation in the Production System: The ‘Active’ and ‘Inactive’ Populations in Late 19th-Century France
Agnès Hirsch
The partition of the French population into ‘active’ and ‘inactive’ subpopulations, a 19th-century construction, emerged out of interactions between two conceptions of activity. The first, introduced in the early 1860s, aimed to construct social classes based on the position of the household head, representing society through its structuring dependence relations. The second, established with the 1896 census, set out to characterize the state of productive forces throughout France. This new partition was both a reflection of and a vector for transformations of labour. It reflected them because its emergence mirrors multiple shifts in the representation of activity: from the scale of the household to that of the individual, from family activity to collective activity
within institutions, and from workshops to factories. It was a vector for these transformations because it opened up the possibility of using employment statistics as a policy tool. It responded to the desire to obtain knowledge of labour—and more specifically of waged labour—to regulate it, notably through the creation of insurance laws.

Changes in Labour Force Participation and Employment Rates Across Successive Cohorts in France
Henri Martin
The large increase in female labour force participation (LFP) in France since the 1970s has been widely documented in the economic literature. Drawing on Labour Force surveys conducted by INSEE over a period of 44 years from 1975 to 2018, this article examines changes in male and female LFP and employment rates. While the LFP and employment rates of women aged 25–50 increased steadily from one generation to the next from the cohorts born in the 1920s, the data reveal a stalling of the uptrend after 1970. Among men, LFP and employment rates at these ages have seen a slow decrease across cohorts. The gender gap in LFP and employment rates continues to narrow, but at an ever slower pace. For the cohorts born before 1970, this convergence between men and women was due mainly to higher female rates, but it is now entirely attributable to declining rates among men.