Absolute poverty and social protection in the EU: a cross-national comparison

Abstract

This chapter offers an empirical exploration of extreme poverty trends and patterns in the EU from a welfare regime perspective. Extreme poverty is operationalized as severe material deprivation, that is, the enforced inability to pay for a certain amount of goods and services. The empirical findings indicate that extreme poverty is low in the countries of the Social-democratic welfare regime and high in the countries of the South-European and the Liberal regime, whereas the countries of the Conservative-Corporatist welfare regime place themselves in-between.