Bucharest, December 25, 2024 – RBJ – According to the latest Eurostat report, the poverty rate remains quite high in the European Union. In 2023, 16.2% of the EU population – or some 71.7 million people – were at risk of poverty. The risk of poverty rate is based on national poverty thresholds and the map presents at risk of poverty at regional level using the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics.
It is worth noting that Eastern European countries have recovered a lot from 10 years ago and many regions have a high degree of development, more than other regions in Western countries.
At the regional level, 10 regions in the EU had a share of people at risk of poverty above 30%.
The highest shares were found in the outmost region of France, Guyane, where more than half (53.0%) of the people were at risk of poverty, followed by Calabria (40.6%) and Sicilia (38.0%) in Italy.
By contrast, 26 regions recorded shares below 10%. The Romanian region of Bucureşti-Ilfov had the lowest rates of people at risk of poverty (2.1%), ahead of the Italian region Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano/Bozen (3.1%) and the Belgian region Prov. Oost-Vlaanderen (5.4%). The very low degree of poverty in the Bucureşti-Ilfov region indicates an important change in Romania’s standard of living. In fact, in 2023 and 2024, Romania surpassed almost all Eastern European states in terms of GDP/capita, reaching this year the level of Poland and above the levels of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Portugal.
Regarding the poverty level indicator, the Bucharest-Ilfov region, with a population of almost 5 million inhabitants, is 3-4 times better situated than the regions of Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, whose poverty levels are between 6.9 and 8.3%
The at-risk-of-poverty rate (AROP) is part of the at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion rate (AROPE). It is the share of people with an equivalised disposable income (after social transfer) below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold, which is set at 60% of the national median equivalised disposable income after social transfers. This indicator does not measure wealth or poverty, but low income in comparison to other residents in that country, which does not necessarily imply a low standard of living.
