Poverty Prospects in Europe : Assessing Progress towards the Europe 2020 Poverty and Social Exclusion Targets in New European Union Member States
European Council approved the Europe 2020 strategy, an economic growth and wellbeing improvement plan for the European Union (EU) in the ensuing decade. The strategy includes five interrelated headline targets to be achieved by the year 2020, encom...
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| Format: | Poverty Assessment |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/06/17939141/poverty-prospects-europe-assessing-progress-towards-europe-2020-poverty-social-exclusion-targets-new-european-union-member-states http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16254 |
| Summary: | European Council approved the Europe
2020 strategy, an economic growth and wellbeing improvement
plan for the European Union (EU) in the ensuing decade. The
strategy includes five interrelated headline targets to be
achieved by the year 2020, encompassing employment,
innovation, education, poverty and social inclusion, and
climate/energy. An overarching goal of the Europe 2020
strategy is to reduce the number of poor and social excluded
people by 20 million, with national level targets set by
each of the EU Member States. The European council used
three measures of poverty and social exclusion: at risk of
poverty rate, a measure of relative poverty defined as the
percent of the population with incomes less than 60 percent
of the national median income after social transfers; the
index of severe material deprivation, a measure of the
percent of people who cannot afford a number of necessities
that are considered essential in order to live decent lives
in Europe; and low work intensity, which is the percentage
of people living in households in which adults worked less
than 20 percent of their potential. This paper sheds light
on the impact of improving employment and education
conditions on poverty and social exclusion indicators. This
paper is divided into eight sections. Section one
introduction, section two provides background information on
poverty and social exclusion indicators in the ten countries
in the New Member States (NMS) group, including their
evolution since 2005. Section three describes the data
sources used and defines the key variables of interest.
Section four outlines the methodology used to simulate
indicators of poverty and social exclusion. Section five
first presents the results from a validation exercise in
which data from 2005 are used to simulate the likely
outcomes in 2008, and then compares the simulated 2008
values to the actual 2008 values. Section six presents the
results of the simulation exercise for the ten countries in
the study. Section seven provides an illustration of how the
simulation model has been adapted to address policies on
pre-schools in Poland. And finally, section eight offers a
set of overall conclusions. |
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