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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
