Temporal and spatial analysis of social inequalities: An innovative method to grasp social inequalities evolution on the territory

This paper puts forward a methodology to rank the population along a hierarchical continuum, from a lower level to a higher level of social precariousness. Going beyond the complex layered issues related to the concept of poverty, it rather explores the notion of deprivation with the idea of social inequalities which are observable according to specific socio-economic key dimensions. Part of a broader research – Destiny – focusing on both the spatial and the temporal evolutions of social inequalities in Belgium and Luxembourg, this method represents a first phase of the project. The social inequalities are addressed in an individual perspective with disaggregated data. This standpoint allowed the analysis of the whole population for Belgium and Luxembourg in a ten-year period (1991 and 2001). The method is based, on the one hand, on the national censuses from both countries – the only comprehensive data available on an individual basis –, and on the second hand, on the European Union - Study on Income and Living Conditions Panel (EU-SILC). These two data sources have been combined for accessing economic information from EU-SILC and transposed into the national censuses in both countries. The EU-SILC detailed data on household income were used as an indicator of social inequalities for three dimensions: education, socio-professional status and housing. This enabled to rank each individual on a ‘social continuum’. After a presentation of the methodological framework, individual ranking results are exposed and discussed on the basis of spatial analysis.