2014 EU-SILC International Conference Conference, Lisbon, 16-17 October 2014

2014 EU-SILC International Conference
Conference, Lisbon, 16-17 October 2014
- Session 1 -
Comparing poverty estimates using income, expenditure and material
deprivation
Paola Serafino and Richard Tonkin
(UK Office for National Statistics [ONS])
Abstract
The Europe 2020 social inclusion target will be measured according to work attachment,
income and material deprivation indicators using the EU Statistics on Income and Living
Conditions (EU-SILC). However, there has been increasing interest in recent years in whether
expenditure and consumption provide more appropriate measures of standard of living than
income. This Net-SILC2 work package therefore aims to compare people’s exposure to
poverty using four different measures: income, expenditure, material deprivation and low work
intensity. However, no single data source provides joint information on all these variables.
Therefore, the analysis described in this paper uses the results of statistically matching
expenditure from the Household Budget Survey (HBS) with income and material deprivation
contained within EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) using 2010 data for the
UK, Germany and Belgium. These matched datasets were used to analyse the overlap
between income and expenditure poverty and material deprivation, as well as the relationship
between income and expenditure poverty and other measures of social exclusion.
Richard Tonkin and Paola Serafino are from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS). This work has been supported by the second Network for
the analysis of EU-SILC (Net-SILC2), funded by Eurostat. The European Commission and ONS bear no responsibility for the analyses and
conclusions, which are solely those of the authors. Email address for correspondence: paola.serafino@ons.gsi.gov.uk. The authors would like to
thank David Gordon, Tony Atkinson and Eric Marlier for their helpful comments and discussions.