Eric Marlier

Building a Material Deprivation Index in a Multinational Context: Lessons from the EU Experience

Social indicators can play an important role not only at national but also international level, in making it possible to compare the living conditions in different countries according to a set of commonly agreed criteria. For them to play this role in a multinational context, their construction needs to follow methodological principles that ensure their relevance and comparability across countries. This chapter argues that the Euro-Mediterranean countries can benefit from the European Union (EU) experience in building a common framework for monitoring, understanding and also fighting poverty and social exclusion. As a concrete example, it discusses methodological issues raised by the construction of indicators on material deprivation, defined as an enforced lack of a combination of items depicting some aspects of living conditions related to housing conditions, possession of durables and capacity to afford basic requirements. More specifically, this chapter focuses on the selection of items, their dimensional structure, their aggregation in a synthetic measure and their weighting. It also puts in perspective material deprivation and income-based poverty indicators to emphasise the complementarity of the two approaches when applied to a group of countries with heterogeneous standards of living. It covers 24 EU countries.

Improving the measurement of material deprivation at the European Union level

In June 2010, European Union (EU) Heads of State and Government adopted a social inclusion target as part of the new ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’: to lift at least 20 million people in the EU from the risk of poverty and exclusion by 2020. One of the three indicators used to monitor progress towards this target is the EU indicator of severe material deprivation (MD). A main limitation of this indicator is the weak reliability of some of the items it is based on. For this reason, a thematic module on MD was included in the 2009 wave of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey. This article assesses the 2009 EU-SILC MD data and proposes an analytical framework for developing robust EU MD indicators. It carries out a systematic item by item analysis at both EU and country levels to identify the MD items which satisfactorily meet suitability, validity, reliability and additivity criteria across the EU. This approach has resulted in a proposed 13-item MD indicator covering some key aspects of living conditions which are customary across the whole EU covering a broad range of basic (food, clothes, shoes, etc.) as well as social (Internet, regular leisure activities, etc.) necessities.

Towards an EU measure of child deprivation

This paper proposes a new measure of child material and social deprivation (MSD) in the European Union (EU) which includes age appropriate child-specific information available from the thematic deprivation modules included in the 2009 and 2014 waves of the “EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions” (EU-SILC). It summarises the main results of the in-depth analysis of these two datasets, identifies an optimal set of robust children MSD items and recommends a child-specific MSD indicator for use by EU countries and the European Commission in their regular social monitoring. In doing this, the paper replicates and expands on the methodological framework outlined in Guio et al. (2012, 2016), particularly by including additional advanced reliability tests.

Alternative vs. current measures of material deprivation at EU level: What differences does it make?

Guio, Gordon and Marlier (2012) have proposed a theory based analytical framework for developing robust (i.e. suitable, reliable, valid and additive) aggregate indicators that could be used for analytical and monitoring purposes at national and EU levels. They have applied this framework to EU-SILC data collected in 2009, and as a result of their systematic item by item analysis carried out at both EU and country levels, they have suggested an alternative material deprivation (MD) indicator which consists of 13 items – six are common to the current 9-item MD indicator and seven are new. This paper discusses the impact of the move from the current EU definition of MD to this alternative 13-item indicator – impact in terms of the size of the population deprived throughout the EU, impact in terms of the composition (socio-demographic characteristics) of this population as well as impact on the Europe 2020 social inclusion target.

Cohésion sociale et territoriale au Luxembourg

Cet ouvrage porte sur la cohesion sociale et territoriale au Luxembourg. Ses seize chapitres abordent les facettes socio-economiques et spatiales de ces concepts. Ils couvrent ainsi des domaines aussi varies que les inegalites monetaires (revenus, salaires, richesse, pauvrete), les inegalites non monetaires (logement, emploi, education, integration des migrants) ou encore les inegalites en matiere de mobilite et d’acces aux services publics. Grâce a un travail editorial et explicatif minutieux, cet ouvrage reussit le pari d’etre accessible au grand public tout en etant scientifiquement rigoureux. Un de ses atouts majeurs est son approche resolument interdisciplinaire. Pres de quarante auteurs du Centre de recherche luxembourgeois CEPS/INSTEAD y ont contribue. L’economie, la geographie, la sociologie et les statistiques sociales s’y cotoient et apportent des eclairages complementaires en croisant reellement les savoirs. En ancrant bon nombre de ses analyses dans une perspective internationale (englobant les pays limitrophes ou meme l’ensemble de l’Union europeenne), ce livre se penche aussi sur la mise en œuvre des politiques publiques en matiere de cohesion (sociale et territoriale) dans un cadre supranational. Cet ouvrage est preface par Jean-Claude Juncker, Premier ministre du Grand-Duche de Luxembourg et ancien president permanent de l’Eurogroupe.

Pauvreté et inégalités en Belgique. Quelques éléments de comparaison internationale

In this paper, the most relevant social indicators agreed upon at European Union (EU) level are used to briefly describe the performances of Belgium in fighting poverty and inequalities, and also to compare these performances with those of the other EU Member States. To fine-tune the description made of these Belgian performances, we bring into our analysis some national indicators which address important areas currently not covered by the EU set of indicators. Finally, we also portray the social situation in Belgium at a regional level within the limits allowed by the available data. JEL: I32