The evolution of relative income poverty in Belgium (1985 - 2021): comparing income poverty indicators across socio-economic groups

Research on long relative income poverty trends has often been hindered by the lack of reliable data sources for the earlier years in the trend. This is particularly true for Belgium, which lacks a unique data source for the period preceding the establishment of EU-SILC. Recently, BE-PARADIS, a Belgian interuniversity project, has contributed to filling this gap by harmonizing the different surveys available for the 1980s and 1990s, and reconstituting a more consistent income trend between 1985 and 2021. By employing the dataset developed by the BE-PARADIS project, and by using original data to integrate an extra poverty estimate for Flanders for 1976, in this working paper we analyze the evolution of distinct income poverty indicators across the whole population and by several socio-economic subgroups. Specifically, we observe how relative income poverty – calculated both by using a 60% and 40% median income threshold – evolved among the workingage population, pensioners, individuals with a low educational degree, and individuals living in very low work intensity households. We also trace the evolution of the anchored poverty rate, the poverty gap, and the median equivalized household income over time and across the already mentioned subgroups. While relative income poverty declined between 2018 and 2021, we find that this increased during the decade 2008-2018. The evolution of the income poverty rate, calculated using the 40% threshold, follows a similar trend, and the poverty gap also shrunk between 2018 and 2021. Moreover, we show that the increase in median yearly incomes strengthened between 2018 and 2021. The subgroups’ analysis reveals that, while income poverty declined strongly among pensioners, particularly between 2006 and 2014, it increased among the working-age between 2008 and 2018. Low educated individuals and those living in very low work intensity households also became poorer between 2005 and 2018, but their poverty rates decreased between 2018 and 2021. While the decline after 2018 brought overall and working-age income poverty down to historically low levels, for the lower educated and those in low work intensity households, in 2021 poverty remained higher than at the onset of the trend – whether one considers the shorter EU-SILC trend from 2004 or the long trend since 1985, or even 1976. This prompts questions on what made these specific groups poorer during the years of increasing relative poverty, and how this explains the upward poverty trend before 2018.