GINI DP 68: Material Deprivation in Europe

Introduction Most research on poverty in Europe employs income to distinguish the poor, with a great deal of research and debate on how best to establish an income cut-off – examples from a very large literature include Atkinson, Rainwater and Smeeding (1995) and the OECD’s recent comparative studies Growing Unequal (2008) and Divided We Stand (2011). In parallel, though, non-monetary indicators of living standards and deprivation have also been developed and investigated, notably in Townsend’s (1979) pioneering work using them to derive and validate an income poverty threshold, and Mack and Lansley’s (1985) attempt to directly identify those experiencing exclusion in Britain. Since then an extensive research literature on measures of material deprivation in OECD countries has grown up, with the valuable review by Boarini and Mira d’Ercole (2006) listing over a hundred studies. A much more limited set of studies employs non-monetary indicators to capture and analyse poverty and exclusion in a comparative perspective, in particular the countries of the European Union (EU) before and after enlargement (This research is reviewed, and a full set of references given, in Nolan and Whelan, 2011, Chapter 2).These rely on indicators from the European Community Household Panel Survey (ECHP) organised by Eurostat and carried out in most of the (then) EU member states from the mid-1990s to 2001, and from the EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data-gathering framework which replaced the ECHP. ...