SUBJECTIVE POVERTY IN EUROPE: THE ROLE OF HOUSEHOLD SOCIOECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS AND SOCIAL CAPITAL

Recently, both researchers and policy-makers have shown an increasing interest towards subjective poverty arguing that it depends on people’s perceptions and not exclusively on the income needed to satisfy household needs. Research on subjective poverty has been steadily increasing in Europe but, because of lack of data, limited attention has been devoted to evaluate to what extent self-perception of poverty is associated to household socio-economic characteristics and to collective and individual social capital endowment. The EU-SILC survey and the Eurostat database offer a new opportunity for research in this field. They are important sources for comparative studies on household economic outcomes, since they provide comparable and high quality cross-sectional indicators for 27 countries. This paper aims to show to what extent self-perceived poverty is affected by household socio-economic characteristics and by collective and household social capital endowment. Our goal is to disclose the primary risk factors of European family poverty status on which current policies should focus. The analysis is based on the EU-SILC 2008 assuming as a proxy of household subjective poverty the answers to the question “Are you able to make ends meet ?”. Further information on social capital endowment is obtained from Eurostat database.