The incidence of a persistent risk of extreme poverty

The proportion of the population across the EU with income below 40% of the median in the country in which they live - which is sometimes termed being at risk of extreme poverty - is, of course, much smaller than the proportion with income below 60% of the median, though the extent of the difference varies (see the section Risk of poverty). The proportion, as for those below 60% of the median, is largest in Latvia and Greece and smallest in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic (though the proportion is second largest in Greece, rather than Spain). The change in the proportion over the four income years 2005-2008, according to the longitudinal data, is also not entirely in line with the change in the proportion below 60% of the median. In particular, the proportion does not increase over the period in Estonia, though it does fall in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Poland.

Moreover, the proportion of those with income persistently below 40% of the median is much more variable in relation to those with income below this level in the survey year than in the case of those with income below 60% of the median. On average across the 24 countries for which there are data, just under 2% of the population have income persistently below 40% of the median, which is around a third of those with income below this level in 2008 - much less than in the case of the 60% poverty threshold.

The proportion at persistent risk of extreme poverty in 2008 was largest in Latvia (slightly below 5%), which also had the largest proportion of extreme poverty risk in 2008, followed by Greece (over 3% of the population). Slovenia had the highest ratio of those at persistent risk to those at risk (almost 74%), implying that almost three out of four people with income below 40% of the median in 2008 had income persistently below this level over the preceding three years and reflecting the difficulty that those with very low income face in increasing it to above the 40% threshold.

At the other end of the scale, the proportion persistently at extreme risk of poverty was below 1% in nine of the 24 countries. It was particularly small in the Czech Republic, Luxembourg and Austria (under one in 300), as was the relative number of those with income below 40% of the median in 2007 who persistently had income below this level over the period. The probability of someone at extreme risk of poverty remaining so for a number of years was, therefore, well below 20% in these three countries, as it was in Malta. 

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