The Impact of Social Transfers on Income Poverty and Material Deprivation
In 2010, the European Union (EU) committed to lifting at least 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion, using income poverty, severe material deprivation, and (quasi-)joblessness as metrics to measure progress on this goal. As part of a broader set of commonly agreed indicators, the EU also (crudely) measures the impact of transfers by comparing income poverty rates before and after social transfers. This chapter develops a regression approach to study the effects of transfers on material deprivation by predicting the material deprivation rate before social transfers. We apply the method to pre-recession and post-austerity EU-SILC data for Germany, Greece, Poland, and the United Kingdom. We find that, in addition to reducing income poverty, transfers substantially reduce the extent and depth of material deprivation. Changes in social transfers, therefore, have a twofold effect on Europe’s poverty-reduction target.