Changes in the population measured as materially deprived

Data from the EU-SILC enable the relative number of people who are materially deprived according to the indicator to be calculated for the years 2005 to 2009 for most Member States. The results show an overall reduction in the proportion for most countries over this period, but an increase in Germany, Ireland, Spain, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Hungary, Austria, Portugal and Slovenia (Table 6).

The decline in the proportion was especially large in the three Baltic States, Cyprus, Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia - over 10 percentage points in each case, and over 20 percentage points in Poland and Lithuania. The changes shown by the 'simple' measure (i.e. that shown directly by successive surveys) are broadly in line with those shown by alternative measures of the change, the first two of which are available only for a slightly shorter period. These are the longitudinal (or panel) data, which relate to the same households surveyed in each year, and a linked series, which shows the change for the same households surveyed in consecutive years. (The latter increases the sample by three times relative to the panel, which itself is only 25% of the full sample surveyed.)[1] A fourth measure of the change - the proportion unable to afford an annual holiday - also shows a large reduction for all countries, apart from Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and the UK (though in the case of Poland the decrease is smaller than for the material deprivation measure). Ireland is an extreme case, where the proportion unable to afford an annual holiday increased by 14 percentage points between 2005 and 2009, mostly in the last two years (reflecting the onset of the recession, which occurred there earlier than in most other countries).

Since all four measures show similar changes over the period for nearly all countries, this gives some confidence that there was a change in the proportion of people materially deprived between 2006 and 2009 at least in the different countries; this is broadly in line with what was shown by the full survey data.

Examining the year-to-year changes that occurred over this four-year period, it is evident that the pattern of change was not smooth in a number of countries. In particular, in Ireland the increase in the proportion of the materially deprived was concentrated (as was mentioned above) in 2008 and 2009. In the UK, there was also an increase in those two years, though this was not large enough to offset the fall of earlier years.

See Tables

[1] The sample surveyed by the EU-SILC is intended to be representative of the population in each country. However, the sample nature of the survey means that the data inevitably involve a margin of error when results are compared between years, because the people surveyed are not precisely the same. The use of panel data means that the people surveyed are the same each year, which overcomes one potential source of error when examining changes over time; but it raises another, since there is no certainty that the changes in circumstances shown by the panel are representative of the changes experienced by the population as a whole.