Mapping poverty at the local level in Europe: A consistent spatial disaggregation of the AROPE indicator for France, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom

Abstract

In the EU, territorial inequalities in terms of income and poverty have been broadly analysed at the national and regional levels. However, mainly due to the lack of reliable data, very little attention has been paid to territorial inequalities within European regions, namely, at a more local level, such as in metropolitan areas, cities or neighbourhoods. This paper proposes a methodology to disaggregate official regional poverty figures into poverty indicators for smaller spatial units, mainly local administrative units. For each country, poverty figures at the regional level from household surveys are combined with microcensus data that contain details on the local entities of residence to disaggregate the regional poverty indicator. In contrast to previous methodologies, our proposed technique guarantees consistency between the local poverty estimates and the regional poverty figures through a second step that adjusts the initial estimates based on generalized cross entropy. The procedure is applied for four European countries: France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Portugal. The resulting local estimates provide an intraregional map of poverty and some insights into the particular behaviour of the capital regions and the disparities between city centres and their surrounding areas.

Regional economic disparities, spatial dependence and proximity structures

“…The analysis of disparities at a detailed geographical level (i.e., NUTS 3) can let us define very ad hoc strategies (Díaz‐Dapena et al, 2021). First, a deeper understanding of what is going on within the larger regions (NUTS 2) could be required to be more effective.…”

“…However, the use of those variables for building a proximity matrix for a large panel of regions at the NUTS 3 level is limited by data availability. Hence, a deeper analysis of those aspects could be conveyed in more local studies that could support policy makers (Díaz‐Dapena et al, 2021).…”

Rural-Urban Inequalities and Spatial Justice in Europe

“…Identifying local scale territorial inequalities can be challenging due to the paucity and inconsistency of available data and this in it-self can contribute to the under-recognition of pockets of deprivation and poverty in rural areas. The estimation of local scale data in IMAJINE using spatial data disaggregation techniques attempted to overcome this obstacle and the results reveal more nuanced profiles of local scale deprivation, in which rural-urban differences are evident (Cartone et al, 2020;Díaz Dapena et al, 2020). In France, for example, communes with the highest levels of deprivation can be observed to be clustered in mountain and peripheral rural areas including the Massif Central, Pyrenees, Jura, and parts of Corsica, Normandy and Picardy, while more urbanized regions show less deprivation on a composite indicator.…”