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This chapter focuses on the use of material deprivation indicators in monitoring progress and setting targets to reduce poverty in Europe. It highlights some key implications of the approaches and analyses presented throughout the book for the understanding of poverty and social exclusion in Europe, and for the best ways to monitor progress in combating them. The ways in which non-monetary indicators have been used in this volume — to identify distinct dimensions of deprivation and explore how they relate to each other, to capture generalized deprivation and ‘consistent’ poverty, and to identify those vulnerable to poverty and exclusion — have important lessons for the broader monitoring of progress and assessment of strategies as the EU's Social Inclusion Process develops, as well as the way poverty and exclusion are monitored at national level.

Research and monitoring of poverty in rich countries relies primarily on household income to capture living standards and distinguish the poor. Significant efforts have been made to broaden the measure of financial resources and capture the dynamics of income over time. At the same time, there is increasing interest in using nonmonetary information to improve the measurement and understanding of poverty. Such nonmonetary indicators are increasingly used in individual European countries, as well as at the EU level, with the suite of indicators employed to monitor the EU's social inclusion process recently expanded to include a summary deprivation measure. This chapter focuses on the rationales underpinning the use of measures of material deprivation and at the variety of ways they are employed in research and monitoring poverty. It looks at some key patterns revealed by deprivation indicators across the EU, and then discusses the implications for capturing poverty and its multidimensionality. Finally, it highlights some challenges in the further development and use of such measures.

This chapter takes advantage of the availability of European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data for the full range of European countries to address both weak and strong versions of the thesis of Europeanization of reference groups. The former proposes that common standards of evaluation emerge as a consequence of knowledge of conditions in other societies, while the latter argues that people increasingly perceive themselves as part of a larger European stratification system. Section 10.2 begins by reviewing the arguments for a ‘Europeanization’ of reference groups. The rest of the chapter focuses on how these can be assessed by examining the relationship between material deprivation and subjective economic stress. Section 10.3 looks at how levels of consumption deprivation and subjective economic stress vary across the countries of the enlarged EU. Section 10.4 present estimates of the impact of consumption deprivation on economic stress and how that varies across countries, and discusses their implications for reference group hypotheses. Finally, Section 10.5 summarizes the conclusions.

This chapter questions the usefulness of the measures of material deprivation chosen by the EU as part of their portfolio of social indicators. It argues that although these income-based measures generate social indicators that are concrete, plausible, and convenient to use, they fail to convey the experiential quality of poverty as a condition of life—living hungry, cold, unable to meet normal social expectations, and in dread of what the future holds. They also overlook the possession of other resources and sources of support that can alleviate the conditions of poverty.

In 2010, the European Union (EU) committed to lifting at least 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion, using income poverty, severe material deprivation, and (quasi-)joblessness as metrics to measure progress on this goal. As part of a broader set of commonly agreed indicators, the EU also (crudely) measures the impact of transfers by comparing income poverty rates before and after social transfers. This chapter develops a regression approach to study the effects of transfers on material deprivation by predicting the material deprivation rate before social transfers. We apply the method to pre-recession and post-austerity EU-SILC data for Germany, Greece, Poland, and the United Kingdom. We find that, in addition to reducing income poverty, transfers substantially reduce the extent and depth of material deprivation. Changes in social transfers, therefore, have a twofold effect on Europe’s poverty-reduction target.

This chapter offers an empirical exploration of extreme poverty trends and patterns in the EU from a welfare regime perspective. Extreme poverty is operationalized as severe material deprivation, that is, the enforced inability to pay for a certain amount of goods and services. The empirical findings indicate that extreme poverty is low in the countries of the Social-democratic welfare regime and high in the countries of the South-European and the Liberal regime, whereas the countries of the Conservative-Corporatist welfare regime place themselves in-between.

This chapter examines policy and practice for addressing health inequalities during adulthood. It discusses the key sources of vulnerability including lifestyle, psychosocial health and material living conditions and analyses the evidence base for what works and the relationship of what works to the policy environment. It suggests that the evidence base for interventions targeting psychosocial health and material deprivation is far more tenuous than for behavioural interventions targeting lifestyle.

This chapter examines the changes in the expenditure patterns and access to specific goods and services from 1997 to 2001, as incomes rose in response to benefit changes and employment shocks. The data used in this chapter is from the Family Expenditure Survey (FES) which was conducted from 1996/97 to 2000/01. The overall aim of the chapter is to illustrate where the increased income goes in terms of patterns of household consumption and ownership of goods. Particular attention is given to specific items that are consumed by the children or that promote their learning and development. Based on the notion that deprived families often lag behind others in their spending on these items, this chapter aims to discover whether these low-income families increase their spending and narrow the gaps between them and other families as their income rises. From a comparative perspective, the chapter presents the spending patterns for low-income families with children and the spending patterns of higher-income families with children before and after the policy reforms of the Labour government. Comparisons of families with children who were less likely to be affected by the policy reforms are also tackled. In addition to discussing spending patterns of families in the UK, the chapter also examines how measures of material deprivation change as incomes rise. Specifically, the chapter probes into durable goods owned by low-income families such as cars, washing machines, tumble dryers, telephones, and computers. Understanding how measures of material deprivation change is crucial to the government's decision to include an indicator of consistent poverty. Results show that as incomes rise within low-income families, their expenditure patterns also change and become more akin to affluent families. The difference lies in their spending emphases: low-income families tend to prioritise spending on goods for children more than affluent families.

This chapter examines the condition of merchants and their families in the Confederate South during the period from 1861 to 1863. It explains that the effect of the American Civil War on the southern commercial population transcended the number of merchants who served and died while fighting for the Confederacy. During this period, Confederate citizens endured material deprivation, loss of independence to a swelling state bureaucracy, and all the personal hazards associated with warfare. Several policies implemented by the Confederate government also had a conspicuous impact on merchant families, particularly conscription.

This chapter discusses how the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of neuroscience conceal the deeply political and moral nature of decisions about what is best for children. The current early intervention logic is rooted in simplistic notions of cause and effect, with the ends of improved human capital justifying the interventions to ensure its production. The chapter then explores potential future directions, contrasting the ‘brave new world of prevention science’ and its instrumental economic logic, with a socially just approach to increasing family income and reducing material deprivation, and more collectivist ideals of supporting families, reducing social harm, and humanely addressing the social good for its own sake.

This chapter provides an overview of how the Great Recession affected the economies of the industrialized world and fed through to social spending and to key indicators of child poverty and material deprivation. This sets the context for the in-depth case studies of eleven countries presented in the rest of this volume. The chapter describes macro-economic and labour market trends across forty-one rich countries, reviews changes in child poverty and material deprivation rates from 2008 and analyses fluctuations in social spending and the value of cash transfers for families with children. In doing so, the overview demonstrates that the eleven countries studied in depth in this book cover a broad span in terms of the extent and nature of the macroeconomic impact of the crisis, their initial levels of economic output per head and of child poverty and deprivation, and the increases in child poverty observed during the recession.

This chapter discusses the extreme levels of material deprivation and the meager forms of palliative state assistance that characterize daily life in Arquitecto Tucci. It first reviews the neighborhood's recent history as one marked by deindustrialization and informalization before considering the formation and pacification of the informal street market known as La Salada (an important source of jobs for the local population) and the depacification of its surrounding area. In particular, it examines the role played by violence in the origins of La Salada, as well as the ways in which the daily functioning of the market has become more “civilized” (that is, devoid of violence) over time. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the increasing levels of interpersonal violence in the area adjacent to La Salada, which it ascribes to expanding opportunities for crime.

This chapter provides a diagnosis of the economic ill-fare of Spanish children since 2008 with the objective of assessing the impact that the Great Recession has had on them. The results show children’s great economic vulnerability to changes in the business cycle. The Great Recession has had important consequences on the economic well-being of many children—not only because of the sky-high unemployment rates of the adults that look after them, but also because of the lack of a generous and comprehensive social protection system that can be relied upon when the economy slows down. Notwithstanding this, it is important to remember that child poverty was a major social problem in Spain before this economic downturn.