Measuring and monitoring absolute poverty (ABSPO) – Final Report

This report is the third and final deliverable of the project “Measuring and monitoring absolute poverty (ABSPO)”, a joint initiative of DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission launched in December 2018. The main objective of this pilot project is to take stock of the existing EU framework for poverty measurement, and explore the development of a new cross-country comparable absolute poverty measure for potential EU-wide use. This Report contains a comprehensive analysis of all relevant measurement aspects, and presents three innovative methodologies based on reference budgets and survey-based statistical methods to calculate new absolute monetary poverty thresholds in a harmonised manner across the EU. The resulting ABSPO poverty estimates are broadly robust to different modelling choices, aligned with most European citizens’ subjective views on poverty, and consistent with the observed patterns of material and social deprivation. They yield a series of new and policy-relevant insights about the extent, distribution and dynamics of poverty between and within Member States. The Report also considers how ABSPO methodologies may be scaled up for regular EU-wide regular measurement, and makes important contributions to a number of different thematic domains of poverty measurement and broader social policy analysis.