Europe

Anti-poverty campaigners in Europe have raised concerns over whether national governments are planning to ignore poverty reduction targets when they take decisions on the next round of EU Structural Funds (2014–2020).

The European Anti-Poverty Network (EAPN) has written to all 26 Prime Ministers in advance of the General Affairs Council meeting on 24 April 2012. The letter makes the following demands:

Researchers in Dublin have proposed a novel ‘multi-dimensional’ way to measure poverty in European countries. They say this approach offers more consistent results than using income poverty alone and improves on the ‘ad hoc’ basis used by the European Union for setting its poverty reduction target. The researchers base their analysis on newly available household data from the 2009 round of European Union Statistics on Income and Living Standards (EU-SILC). They identify four dimensions of poverty, apart from the conventional relative income poverty measure. They then define as multi-dimensionally poor those individuals who are above a specified threshold on at least two dimensions out of the four – in contrast to other approaches that count those above the threshold in either just one dimension or in all dimensions. In addition, they adopt an ‘adjusted headcount’ technique that excludes data relating to households that are not deprived.

UNICEF researchers have estimated the degree to which deprivation is experienced by children in 29 European countries, using a child-specific scale. Their paper highlights the considerable differences between countries, suggesting that specific policy measures can be effective in combating child deprivation.

The researchers argue that studying deprivation – alongside the overlapping situation of children living in families poor in monetary terms – is imperative for understanding the scope and nature of poverty among children. Deprivation analyses are especially useful when studying the situation of children because children do not have equal access to the household’s income, and are more dependent on social goods and services (especially education and health).

The 2011 Assessment of Social Inclusion Policy Developments in the EU concludes that during 2011 the financial and economic crisis, together with associated austerity measures, led to an increase in poverty and social exclusion in more than half the member states. The report is the summary of the findings of national reports written by members of the European Union Network of Independent Experts on Social Inclusion assessing the policy developments in their countries during 2011. In the countries where the situation has worsened over the past year, the most frequently cited factors for the worsening situation is a fall in employment rates and a rise in unemployment, or the persistence of an already high level of unemployment. Many experts particularly highlight the poor situation of the young unemployed and the growing proportion of long-term unemployed.