Multidimensional Poverty in Europe. A longitudinal perspective.
This paper explores multidimensional poverty in European countries from a longitudinal perspective. The applied poverty measure is conceptually integrated into the capability approach and informed by the EU context. Technically, the measure relies on the dual-cutoff counting approach. We exploit the panel structure of the EU-SILC data to offer novel evidence from a longitudinal perspective. First, we analyse the overlap of people identified as poor by income and multidimensionally poverty measures. Related results suggest that neither accounting for persistent income poverty, nor adjusted income reference periods, nor variations of the poverty cutoffs can fully explain the observed mismatch in contemporaneous poverty measures. We conclude that more fundamental, conceptual differences consistent with a capability perspective may drive the observed mismatch of both poverty measures. Moreover, the paper also analyses poverty dynamics at the micro-level. Related results suggest that multidimensional poor people are more likely to enter an additional deprivation and less likely to leave already experienced deprivation, than comparable non-poor individuals. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that deprivations may accumulate over time. The paper also discusses implications of these findings for the specification of multidimensional poverty measures.