Seite 61 [61]
Inequalities and Social Europe | 59
in the rest. Again, the underlying differences stem from differences in both the
macroeconomic situations in the countries affected as well as their divergent
policies. We also should note the vast differences between employment levels
in various countries, which are independent of the crisis: high employment
rates in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden (around 75 to 80 per cent)
stand in contrast to significantly lower rates of employment in southern
countries (e.g. Greece, Spain, Italy).
When European politicians speak of inequalities, they probably do not
refer simply to the issue of some groups having much higher incomes than
others. The problem they actually address is twofold. On the one hand,
they think about people who lack decent incomes and live under adverse
financial circumstances. On the other hand - and closely related to the
former - they take issues with the unequal distribution of opportunities.
To capture this, the latest two Figures display data concerning poverty and
deprivation - both are related to some form of exclusion, or at least the
risk of exclusion, still representing very different approaches to relative and
absolute deprivation.
Figure 8 presents the at-risk-of-poverty rate in individual EU countries at
three distinct points in time. On the one hand, this is a relative measure of
poverty, which defines people as poor (or being at risk of poverty) if their
income is less than that of the ‘middle’ person in the income distribution in
the same country (called the median income). The problem with this indicator
is that it provides no information about the actual material circumstances
of ‘poor people, it only states that they have less (or equal) income than the
60 per cent of the median, who may well be themselves better-off persons
given the high enough levels of overall income.
On the other hand, as this measure is defined at the national level, people
considered as ‘poor’ in one country could be far above the poverty threshold
in other countries with the same level of welfare - and vice versa, people high
above the median income in a country may well fall into the category of ‘poor’
persons in another. The concept behind this measure, relative inequality,
undoubtedly affects the quality and cohesion of a society (Wilkinson 2009).
Still, the data should be treated with caution.
Two Figures are shown below, one referring to the total population and
another referring to children below the age of 16, while both referring to
the three different points in time (2008, 2014, and 2019). In both Figures,
countries are ranked according to the respective changes in at-risk-of-poverty
rates between 2008 and 2014. Obviously, the poverty rates for children are
higher in most countries, albeit not in all of them.
Also, the underlying economic turmoil did not necessarily result in
increasing poverty rates. However, taking the definition of this indicator
into consideration, it does not mean necessarily that no ones situation has
deteriorated: lower median incomes also imply lower values in the absolute
value of the poverty threshold (60 per cent of the median income), which is