Income and non-income poverty in the enlarged EU

AUTHORS

Förster, M. F., Tarcali, G. and Till, M.

PUBLICATION YEAR

2004

CITATION

Förster, M.F., Tarcali, G. & Till, M. (2004). Income and non-income poverty in the enlarged EU. Vienna: European Centre.

DESCRIPTION

Between 2002 and 2004, the European Centre undertook a research project, "Income and non-income poverty in Europe: What is the minimum acceptable standard in an enlarged European Union?" Starting point for this research project was the pending enlargement of the European Union, and the observation that the current headline indicators for poverty - such as poverty rates referring to 60% of country-specific median income - would not suffice to accurately describe poverty in new member states with significantly lower income levels. The study examines how alternative measures of poverty in an enlarged Europe could take into account both income and non-income aspects and the extent to which comparative measures of consistent poverty reflect country-specific versus European-wide thresholds. These measures are analysed and applied to survey data from EU-15 and three then accession countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia, for the benchmark year 1999.

A first draft of the study has been presented at the 27th General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, at Djurhamn (Stockholm Archipelago), Sweden, in August 2002. It has further been discussed at the December 2002 General Assembly Meeting of the European Centre. The proceedings of this meeting have been published in EUROSOCIAL 71/03, "Understanding Social Inclusion in a Larger Europe: An Open Debate", Vienna 2003. A revised and updated summary version of the study has been published in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Vol. 7, n° 1, pp. 29-48: "The European Social Space Revisited: Comparing Poverty in the Enlarged European Union", Routledge 2005.