Persistent Deprivation in the European Union

Abstract

As awareness has grown that some of the difficulties associated with the income line approach to poverty arise from the fact that current income provides an extremely imperfect measure of permanent income or command over resources, increased attention has been directed to the use of persistent income poverty measures. In this paper we show that such measures do bear a significantly closer relationship to deprivation measures and come much closer to displaying the properties we require of poverty measures. However, to date, most of the concern with issues of dynamics has focused on income poverty with very little attention being paid to direct measures of deprivation. It seems to have been assumed that deprivation is a great deal more stable than income poverty Our analysis shows that this is not the case and that while there is a clear and systematic relationship between persistent poverty and persistent deprivation the degree of overlap is far from perfect. Over and above the impact of persistent income poverty, a variety of resource related variables such as education, labour market experience and social class, and need related variables such as marital status and household structure, contribute to the risk of exposure to persistent deprivation. Furthermore, the impact of persistent deprivation on experience of extreme economic strain is only partially mediated by persistent income poverty. In our conclusion we stress the importance for both analytic and policy purposes of not allowing a legitimate concern with income and deprivation dynamics to obscure the extent to which life-chances continue to be structured by a set of influences that are shaped by larger socio-economic and political forces.