information for practice

This study uses data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), a group of comparable data sets covering the 15 countries of the pre-enlargement European Union. The research covers the years between 1994 and 2001, in 13 countries: Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. The analysis uses a standard measure of relative poverty: a person is considered to be poor if he or she lives in a household where after-tax income, adjusted for household size, is less than 60 per cent of median income in the country in which he or she lives. It also uses two indicators of deprivation – one based on income, the other on the household’s ability to afford certain necessities of life. Using these extra measures confirms that the findings are valid, and are not simply an effect of the way poverty is measured.