Journal of Statistical and Econometric Methods

Discovering the factors for the impoverishment of the middle class in Greece

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• Abstract 

  Afterwards 2009, Greece confront a sovereign debt crisis. The harsh austerity that is imposed to the country has as a result a severe recession. During this period, the Greek households have lost approximately 30 per cent of their disposable income and the unemployment rate has been dramatically increased and reached 27 per cent of the labour force (Giakoumatos and Karamesini, 2016).All the social classes are suffered by the impoverishment of the Greek society, however the middle class has been decimated during the economic crisis (Karamessini and Giakoumatos 2016). In this analysis, we focus on the investigation of the social mobility from the middle class to the lower class since the beginning of the crisis. We deploy generalized linear models to extended the model of Giakoumatos and Loukas (2017) by including interactions between the independent variables. As as dependent variable we use a dummy variable that takes 1 if a household belong to the of the middle class based the thresholds of 2014 and in the lower class based to the thresholdsof 2008 (before the recession). The empirical analysis provides the statistically significant demographic and social factors that affect this type of social mobility.

  Keywords: Social Class, Disposal Income, Social Mobility, Logistic and Multinomial Models.