Persistent material deprivation and persistent risk of poverty

Persistent material deprivation can be defined in an analogous way to persistent risk of poverty, using the same longitudinal, or panel, data from the EU-SILC. In practice, as for persistent poverty, there is a marked variation between Member States in the relationship between being materially deprived, as defined here (i.e. in terms of not being able to afford at least three out of nine items), and being persistently materially deprived (in the sense of not being able to afford at least three items in 2009 and in at least two of the three preceding years).

The largest proportion of people who are persistently materially deprived is in Bulgaria, where 53% were in this position, almost 90% of those who were materially deprived in 2009; this suggests strongly that there is not much movement out of material deprivation for households which are deprived (Table 7). This is equally a feature of the other countries - all of them EU12 Member States (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovakia) - where the rate of persistent material deprivation is high. In all of these countries, for over two-thirds of those identified as being materially deprived in 2009, this was a persistent state of affairs. 

By contrast, in most of the EU15 countries only a minority of those identified as being materially deprived were also persistently deprived in 2009, in Denmark only around 20%.

As would be expected, given the relative nature of the concept, there is little relationship between the relative number of people in a country who are at risk of poverty and the proportion who are materially deprived. This holds equally for the persistent risk of poverty. Moreover, it is not necessarily the case that those countries in which the persistently deprived make up a large share of the deprived are also those where a large number of people at risk of poverty are persistently at risk. In other words, countries where it seems difficult to get out of being materially deprived are not, in general, those where it is difficult to escape being at risk of poverty.

See Tables