Monetary poverty, Material and social deprivation in the European Union: promoting equitable treatment?

Abstract

Poverty is usually defined as a human condition of deprivation of monetary resources or family income necessary for a dignified life. The at-risk-of-poverty rate is the percentage of the population whose equivalent disposable income is below the poverty line, corresponding to 60% of each national median equivalent disposable income. Nevertheless, the conceptualization must go beyond resource deprivation and be based on a broader conception of well-being. Now, to try to statistically analyse data and subsequently the results at the EU level, we use comparable data between countries. The data comes from Eurostat, promoting equal treatment of all data. From this source, 37 indicators were selected, belonging to two categories: 11 on Material and Social Deprivation and 26 on Monetary Poverty data. With the analysis of these indicators, it will be possible to compare them among the different countries of the EU and even verify differences, assuming that they exist. These indicators may make it possible to discover patterns or relationships between data, namely the existence of influences by type of household and the age of the people who inhabit housing or even the difference between countries with regard to poverty thresholds between male and female. It will be stimulating to understand in which countries the fact of having dependent children or not may have influence and whether this contributes to higher material and social deprivation. This analysis will be performed using R language, which is a programming language focused on data modelling, analysis as well as visualization. The purpose is about whether an equitable distribution of money “maximizes the utility aggregate”, as Frankfurt sustains, that is, the satisfaction of the members of society. The conclusions are to understand whether inequalities in the EU have been tending towards a trajectory in which the standard deviation has a gradually equitable value.