Household composition, poverty and hardship across Europe - 2013 edition - Products Statistical working papers

This Working Paper examines the relationship between household composition and several measures of income sufficiency, including two measures of relative poverty and two measures of subjective hardship. Data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) are used to calculate the risk of poverty and hardship by household type for all countries in the EU. It is found that whereas the importance of different household types varies greatly between countries, the same household types are at the highest risk of poverty and hardship in virtually all countries: lone parents, single elderly people, and other single-adult households. However, while these at-risk groups account for a majority of the poor population across Northern and Western Europe, they account for only a minority of the poor population across Eastern and Southern Europe.