Measuring material deprivation in the EU : indicators for the whole population and child-specific indicators

In June 2010, European Union (EU) Heads of State and Government adopted a social inclusion target as part of the new "Europe 2020 Strategy": to lift at least 20 million people in the EU from the risk of poverty and exclusion by 2020. One of the three indicators used to monitor progress towards this target is the EU indicator of "severe material deprivation (MD)". The main limitations of the current EU MD indicators are the small number (nine) and weak reliability of some of the core items they are based on. MD measures for children are also needed. This is why a thematic module on MD was included in the 2009 wave of EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (EU-SILC). The core MD items of EU-SILC and related indicators will be revised as part of the mid-term review of the Europe 2020 Strategy in 2015. This paper is an assessment of the 2009 EU-SILC MD data by researchers participating in the Second Network for the analysis of EU-SILC (Net-SILC2). It proposes an analytical framework for developing robust EU MD indicators for the whole population as well as for children.