Poverty and deprivation: assessing demographic and social structural factors

Poverty, deprivation and social inequalities have been topics of social science research since decades. From time to time, conspicuously successful periods of economic growth hold out the promise that this social problem will be resolved, but these are invariably followed by leaner years which make it clear that while it may be possible to mitigate the extent and/or the level of poverty and deprivation, it is not possible to eradicate completely them. Needless to say, the mechanisms responsible for creating disadvantaged situations undergo modifications along with changing social and economic structures, altering the forms of disadvantages. Politicians in state socialist countries used to promise their societies that the problem of poverty would be successfully dealt within the new state socialist economic system. Thanks to social policies, inequalities had in fact been somewhat mitigated, but were never eliminated, and they started to increase again in the 1980s (Andorka 1995; Atkinson, Micklewright 1992). Following the change of the political regime in 1989–1990, the topic of poverty got into the focus of public attention and became one of the most frequently discussed social issues, partly because the political transformation resulted in growing inequalities, and partly because it was no longer prohibited to publicly discuss the issue. Poverty, deprivation, disadvantages and marginalization remain central issues of public discussions. This is not surprising, since economic growth could not substantially alleviate the inequalities (Tóth 2005) and at first, its effects were beneficial only to the affluent. That the issue managed to remain on the agenda is in no small way due to certain world organisations as well as the European Union, which regard the management of poverty as one of the most pressing political issues, as attested by such programs as Joint Inclusion Memorandum or the Millennium Development Goals. But the interest of the social sciences has not dwindled either – just as in the past, researchers continue to attempt to identify the mechanisms and structures responsible for creating poverty and disadvantages. This interest received a substantial boost from the social, political and economical transformations1, since it was reasonable to assume that changes in institutional structures and the ascendancy of the market would result in changes in the mechanism responsible for creating disadvantages. Among the “classic” factors responsible for the (re)emergence of poverty, a number of traits which are characteristic of modern societies have been identified and it was concluded that the lack of education, exclusion from the labour market, low and uncertain employment status, single-parent family situations all contribute to an above-the-average risk of poverty. At the same time, a number of rather surprising relationships have been identified. The most striking of these was the rapid and voluminous impoverishment of children and families with children – in other words, a close correlation was found between poverty and the number of children, family structures and ethnicity (Spéder 2002a, 2005). It was also surprising to see that types of settlements or regional status exerted a significant and growing influence on poverty.