HOW TO MEASURE EXTREME POVERTY IN THE EU Our Plan Brussels 22 September 2009

Extreme poverty concepts  Severe or core….  The poverty probably has to be persistent to be extreme?  Absolute measures associated with nutritional standards will probably be salient  It implies a distribution with those in extreme poverty being at the bottom end of it.  One important issue that we have to keep in mind is that this project is about measurement –

Five options for establishing a standard of extreme poverty  Budget standards – minimum income standard  Expenditure surveys – US poverty standard, World Bank  Social assistance scales – government established minimum – below poverty thresholds  Subjective measures – economic stress, absolute/overall thresholds  Social indicators – lack of durables/access to services  3 parts to the work

1. Critical review of previous attempts  International organisations  National governments  Academic publications  Web and library resources  Correspondence with key informants  Please help with non English material

2. Secondary data analysis of SILC  Exploring alternative thresholds  How they change poverty rates, gaps and composition of the poor  Problems  Low income unreliable  Some extremely poor not covered by surveys

Thresholds to be tried  Lower % of median  Social assistance based thresholds  Budget standard thresholds  Income thresholds where deprivation increases  Income+Deprivation thresholds  Problems  European HBS not accessible – spending on necessities, no spending on luxuries

3. Review of thresholds used in Member States  Social assistance/minimum income schemes  Official and semi official thresholds in use. National informants.

Questions  Does this make sense?  Are there any other ways of understanding extreme poverty?