EUROSTAT, the Commission's statistical service, has this week published a fascinating study of comparative poverty rates in the EU. But the figures should be accompanied by a clear consumer warning buyer beware, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. To extract the meat one must delve beneath the surface.
The problem is that comparisons of wealth and poverty rates are notoriously difficult. Are we really comparing like with like?
Take the Commission's unpublished projections for gross domestic product (GDP) per capita: these seem to show that Ireland last year overtook its neighbour, the UK, and will next year climb to eighth position in the EU wealth league, above Finland, Sweden, Britain, Spain, Portugal and Greece at 106 per cent of the EU average.
A cause for dancing in the streets, as we overtake the old rival? Not yet. Ireland has been protesting to the Commission for some time that GDP figures are less reliable indicators of real wealth than gross national product (GNP) figures (in most countries they are broadly equivalent), because of the hugely distorting effect of the repatriation of multinational profits.
The GNP league table is less exciting. Although it shows Ireland has made spectacular progress - from 69 per cent of the EU average per capita income in 1991, to a projected 92.3 in 1998 - the result still leaves us fourth from the bottom, above the three other Cohesion countries of Spain, Portugal and Greece. With Britain on 96.7 per cent of the average, we can expect to overtake them in the year 2000.
Similar reservations must be entered in relation to Eurostat's poverty figures. Social scientists have always argued over definitions of poverty; Those leaning to the left prefer to see the concept as a relative one, specific to each society. To be poor, the argument goes, is to be unable to share in the basic expectations of fellow citizens.
The conservative's definition is fundamentally different. He asserts that poverty exists when individuals can be shown unable to meet an objective standard, such as an ability to pay for three square meals a day.
The EU definition is the former, calculated as half the average household income, adjusted for family size. The problem is then that league tables showing numbers below the poverty line in different states are better measures of relative degrees of inequality than of directly comparable poverty levels. In other words a Greek may be above the poverty line in Greece but be considerably worse off financially than someone below the line in Denmark.
So, although Ireland and the UK are shown to have almost identical proportions of the population living in poor household (21 and 22 per cent respectively), because the purchasing power of someone on the poverty line in Ireland is a quarter less than the same person in the UK, the figures sharply underestimate the relative difference in living standards.
Using the same yardstick as the UK, even though levels of national income per capita are converging rapidly, because the dependency ratio is higher in Ireland we still have a significantly worse poverty problem.
Caveats entered, what do the figures show? That in 1993 just over a quarter of the income in the 12 countries in the EU was shared among the top 10 per cent of households, while the bottom 10 per cent shared a mere 2 per cent of the total.
A comparison of bow income was distributed across the Union showed Portugal to be the most unequal society, followed by Greece and then Britain. Ireland was close to the EU average while the Danes were most egalitarian.
All told some 57 million people, 17 per cent of the EU's population, live below the poverty line, as does one in five children.
Denmark has the lowest proportion of poor households (9 per cent) while Portugal (29 per cent), has the highest. Denmark also has the lowest proportion of children living below the poverty line (5 per cent) while the UK is worst (32 per cent) and Ireland next (28 per cent).
Ireland's record on the elderly is also woeful. As in the UK, 42 per cent of one-person households involving people over 65 are below the poverty line, the third worst in the EU Portugal's figure, the worst, is 55 per cent, the EU average, 27 per cent, and lowest are the Netherlands and Belgium at 16 per cent.
The figures also show that although nearly half the household where the main breadwinner unemployed fall below the poverty line, over a third (35 per cent) of the poor are living in households where the main breadwinner is at work. Poverty wages mean that one in ten active workers are classified as poor.
Looking at non-monetary indicators of poverty, Eurostat finds that 14 per cent of households are in homes with damp walls or floors, 18 per cent say they cannot make ends meet, IS per cent cannot keep their home adequately warm, 31 per cent cannot afford a week's annual holiday away from home, and 15 per cent cannot afford new clothes.
Who says we don't need a social Europe?
