What can be learned from deprivation indicators in Europe

While the list of commonly agreed indicators of social inclusion has a primary focus on indicators of relative income poverty, the Indicators Sub-Group of the Social Protection Committee adopted in February 2009, a new indicator on material deprivation, based on data drawn from EU-SILC (Community Statistics on Income and Living Conditions). Working in close collaboration with Eurostat, Anne-Catherine Guio, from the Institut Wallon de l'Evaluation de la Prospective et de la Statistique (IWEPS), is the author of the present paper. The paper describes the different steps taken over time to overcome the difficulties encountered in agreeing on indicators of material deprivation: lack of data from all Member States, limited number of the current SILC items; lack of comparability of current items due to discrepancies in their implementation at national level; validity of the items to reflect deprivation across Member States; appropriate methodology to build the indicators; giving different weights to the items within dimensions and across countries, or not.