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Access to essential services
Access to communal services
Other dimensions of well-being and living standards should be taken into account when assessing the situation of different people in different parts of the EU, but that are not necessarily reflected in the measure of disposable income or in other measures of resources that are used to draw comparisons between households and between countries. These are communal services of various kinds, which are generally provided by the state in European countries. They include, in particular, education and healthcare, access to which is free of charge or, in the case of the latter, either free or heavily subsidised, depending on an individual's ability to pay. It is not usual, therefore, to take account of the provision of these services when assessing the extent of inequalities in living standards and how far those at the bottom end of the scale are falling below an acceptable level in relative terms.
However, while these services tend to be universally available to everyone across the EU, there may be variations in the quality or the standard of the service that people enjoy, both between and within countries. Such variations in quality, most especially in the case of education, not only contribute to differences in well-being, but are also an important determinant of variations in life chances and, accordingly, in lifetime income.
In the case of healthcare, these variations may be because access (or rapid access) to certain treatments involves the payment of an additional fee, or because geographical variations dictate the physical availability of care. The former aspect is reflected to some extent in the proportion of people in different countries who choose to pay a fee in order to have access to what they regard as a satisfactory level of service (see section on Benefits in kind).
In the case of education, the variations may be because of either geographical variations in the standard of teaching and the availability of teaching aids (which themselves may reflect variations in the prosperity of the areas in which schools are located), or the constraints that young people need to overcome if they are to continue in education beyond basic schooling. These constraints are partly academic (the need to obtain a particular grade in examinations in order to proceed further), partly financial (including the opportunity costs of continuing to study, as well as the need perhaps to cover the fees and/or maintenance costs involved) and partly cultural (the extent to which continuing in education is considered the norm). All three, however, are related in varying degrees - varying between countries and regions within countries - to the circumstances of the person concerned, to their background and to the household and local environment in which they live. Accordingly, the differences in the probability of people with given characteristics and background attaining a high level of education to some extent reflect the extent of inequality in their access to a reasonable standard of education (see section on Social mobility).
Access to other essential services
Access to services is an important aspect of the location in which people live and of their living standards. In practice, as was indicated by the ad hoc module on housing included as part of the EU-SILC for 2007, such access tends to vary not only between those at risk of poverty and those with higher income levels, but also between those living in densely populated (or urban) areas and those living in rural (or sparsely populated) areas. Difficulty of access seems to be particularly widespread in countries where household income is relatively low. Consequently, in many of the lower-income countries in the EU, someone with a given level of income who lives in a rural area is likely to find it substantially more difficult to access a range of essential services than someone who lives in a city with the same income level.
This is illustrated by the proportion of people who report difficulty in accessing more than one of the essential services covered by the ad hoc module - a grocery store, banking and postal services, public transport and primary healthcare.
In most countries, in the case of people living in urban areas, the proportion who report difficulty in accessing at least two of these services is greater if they have income below the poverty threshold than if they do not (though this is not the case in Luxembourg, Austria, Spain, the Czech Republic or Slovakia) (Table 1). In Italy, for those at risk of poverty, the figure reaches 44%; however, it is below 30% everywhere else - and indeed is below 25%, except in Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Hungary. In Italy, a third of those on low income in densely populated areas reported difficulties of access to at least three services - almost twice the figure for any other country - and 15% reported difficult access to all five services.
In rural areas, the share of people who report difficulty in accessing more than one service is much higher. For those with income below the poverty threshold, it amounts to 35% across the EU as a whole, while a quarter report difficulty in accessing three or more services (Table 2). In Greece, over half of those at risk of poverty in rural areas report having difficulty accessing at least two services; over 40% at least three; and over 15% all five. In Italy, Austria, Ireland and Estonia, the proportion reporting difficulties in accessing all five is even higher - 18-22%. In all of these countries, 30% or more reported difficulty in accessing three or more services. This is also the case in the other two Baltic States and in Poland, which serves to emphasise the relatively widespread problem of access to services across the EU, especially among those with low income.
