Poverty and inequality in European regions

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the main source of information about poverty and economic inequality in the member states of the European Union. The sample sizes of its annual national surveys are sufficient for reliable estimation at the national level but not for inferences at sub-national level, failing to respond to a rising demand from policy makers and local authorities. We provide a comprehensive map of median income, inequality (Gini coefficient and Lorenz curve) and poverty (poverty rates) based on the equivalised household income in the countries in which EU-SILC is conducted. We study the distribution of income of households (pro-rated to its members), not merely its median (or mean), because we regard its dispersion and frequency of lower extremes (relative poverty) as important characteristics. Estimation for the regions with small sample sizes is improved by small-area methods. Uncertainty of complex non-linear statistics is assessed by bootstrap. Household-level sampling weights are taken into account in both the estimates and the associated bootstrap standard errors.