A European Union Approach to Material Deprivation using EU-SILC and Eurobarometer data

The paper discusses methodological issues raised by the construction of indicators on material deprivation, which is defined here as an enforced lack of a combination of items depicting some aspects of living conditions related to housing conditions, possession of durables and capacity to afford basic requirements. More specifically, its focus is on the selection of items, their dimensional structure, their aggregation in a synthetic measure and their weighting. The paper also puts in perspective material deprivation and income-based poverty indicators to emphasise the complementarity of the two approaches. It covers the European Union countries available in the 2007 Community Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) users’ data base.Material deprivation ; EU-SILC ; Eurobarometer ; Poverty ; European Union

Income poverty and material deprivation in European countries

Since 2009, the European Union (EU) portfolio of commonly agreed social in-dicators includes measures of material deprivation. The rationale for this inclu-sion is that if purely income-based indicators of poverty and inequality are es-sential, they are nevertheless not sufficient to satisfactorily reflect the diversity of living conditions in the EU, especially since the 2004 and 2007 enlarge-ments. The paper analyses the relationship between income poverty and mate-rial deprivation in 25 European countries (24 EU Member States plus Norway) and aims at identifying the most important factors that determine the risk of being income poor and/or materially deprived. It is based on the 2007 cross-sectional data of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) users? data base.material deprivation; income poverty; European Union; Eu-SILC; open method of coordination; social inclusion

Monitoring the evolution of income poverty and real incomes over time

This paper brings together two approaches to the monitoring of household living standards: the macro-economic (national accounts) analysis of aggregates and the social indicators based on household microdata (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions [EU-SILC]). Both are essential. The national accounts are necessary to provide an overall perspective; the distributional data in EU-SILC are necessary to measure income poverty. The progress, or lack of progress, in reducing income poverty has to be seen in relation to what is happening to the level of real incomes. We begin with the EU-SILC-based headline at-risk-of-poverty indicator, and then consider its relation to the level of household real income as presented in the national accounts. Moving step by step, we seek to identify the reasons for differences between EU-SILC and national accounts measures of real incomes. From this, we make a number of recommendations about possible improvements in the underlying data and in the construction of the social indicators. The substantive results help illuminate the differing experience of the pre-crisis period 2005 to 2008 and the subsequent three year period 2008 to 2011 (income reference years)