Severe material deprivation

Severe material deprivation is defined as being deprived of at least four of the nine items that go to measure material deprivation. This has come to be of increasing interest because it is included as one of the indicators that make up the Europe 2020 poverty target. In practice, just under half of those identified as materially deprived across the EU are severely deprived according to the above definition. The proportion varies across countries, tending to be larger in those where the relative number who are materially deprived is highest - in Bulgaria and Romania, especially, where around a third of the population were severely deprived in 2009, but also in Latvia, Poland and Hungary - and smaller in those where the number is lowest (in Luxembourg, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and Finland). Accordingly, there is slightly more variation across countries in the proportion who are severely deprived than for those who are simply deprived. Moreover, the rank order of countries in terms of severe material deprivation is very similar to that for deprivation (Table 9, in which the countries are ranked in terms of the proportion of population who are materially deprived according to the 2009 data).

The change in the proportion of severely deprived over the four years 2005-2009 is also similar to the change in the proportion of deprived (the correlation between the two changes is 0.96). As in the case of the latter, therefore, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Latvia and Bulgaria all showed a big reduction in the relative number of people suffering from severe deprivation, while Austria, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Slovenia and France all experienced an increase (though, except in Austria and Ireland, of less than 1 percentage point).

See Tables