Persistent income poverty and deprivation in the European Union: An analysis of the first three waves of the European Community Household Panel

Poverty research has increasingly focused on persistent income poverty, both as a crucial social indicator and as a target for policy intervention. Such an approach can lead to an identification of a sub-set of poor individuals facing particularly adverse circumstances and/or distinctive problems in escaping from poverty. Here we seek to establish whether, in comparison with cross-sectional measures, persistent poverty measures also provide a better measure of exclusion from a minimally acceptable way of life and relate with other important variables in a logical fashion. Our analysis draws upon the first three waves of the ECHP and shows that a persistent poverty measure does constitute a significant improvement over its cross-sectional counterpart in the explanation of levels of deprivation. Persistent poverty is related to life-style deprivation in a manner that comes close to being uniform across countries. The measure of persistence also conforms to our expectations of how a poverty measure should behave in that, unlike relative income poverty lines, defining the threshold level more stringently enables us to identify progressively groups of increasingly deprived respondents. Overall the persistent poverty measure constitutes a significant advance on cross-sectional income measures. However, there is clearly a great deal relating to the process of accumulation and of erosion of resources, which is not fully captured in the persistent poverty measure. In the absence of such information, there is a great deal to be said for making use of both types of indictors in formulating and evaluating policies while we continue to improve our understanding of longer-term processes.

Income, deprivation, and economic strain. An analysis of the European community household panel

This paper is concerned with the relationship between household income and life-style deprivation, and their combined impact on households' perceptions of economic strain. It takes as a point of departure findings from a number of European countries showing that the relationship between income and deprivation is weaker than widely assumed and that relative income poverty lines may perform poorly in terms of identifying the most deprived households. It proceeds to examine how far these conclusions about income and deprivation can be generalized to the countries included in the first wave of the European Community Household Panel. Results show that five distinct dimensions of deprivation emerge from an overall European analysis and that these are consistent across individual countries. While a good deal of similarity is observed in the income-deprivation relationship, countries differ in the strength of relationship between income and what is termed 'current liferstyle deprivation' with the relationship being generally weakest in the richer countries. The implications of these findings for the use of relative income poverty lines are developed. Extending this analysis to an assessment of how income and deprivation combine to influence perceptions of economic strain, we show that within-nation reference group processes operating in a uniform manner across countries can account for the bulk of the variation in strain. Cross-national differences can be accounted for by corresponding variation in income and deprivation levels.

Persistent and consistent poverty in the 1994 and 1995 waves of the European Community Household Panel Survey

This paper focuses on the mismatch between income and deprivation measures of poverty. Using the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel Survey, a measure of relative deprivation is constructed and the overlap between the relative income poor and relatively deprived is examined, There is very limited overlap with the lowest relative income threshold. The overlap increases as the income threshold is raised, but it remains true that less than half those below the 60 percent relative income line are among the most deprived. Relative deprivation is shown to be related to the persistence of income poverty, but also to a range of other resource and need factors. Income and deprivation measures each contain information that can profitably be employed to enhance our understanding of poverty and a range of other social phenomena. This is illustrated by the manner in which both income poverty and relative deprivation are associated with self-reported difficulty making ends meet.

Economic vulnerability, multidimensional deprivation and social cohesion in an enlarged European community

In this article we have sought to combine regional and social exclusion perspectives on economic exclusion in the enlarged European Community. Our analysis, based on the European Quality of Life Survey, confirms that while the economically vulnerable, identified through latent class analysis, constitute substantially larger groups in the poorer economic clusters, they are much more sharply differentiated from others in the richer clusters. While the economically vulnerable are also disadvantaged in relation to measures of multidimensional deprivation and social cohesion, between economic clusters differences on these dimensions cannot be accounted for by corresponding variations in levels and intensity of economic vulnerability. In fact, the impact of such vulnerability on social cohesion is greater in the more affluent clusters. Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications.