The Housing Dimension of Welfare Reform - the ICCR

suggests that the chances of exiting income poverty are in most countries
quite high. At the same time about 41 per cent of the poor in the year
1997 did never escape from poverty in a four-year period, which also
indicates a perpetuating process of social exclusion.
We may note the following on the country level:
• Denmark is the country with the lowest risk of persistent poverty
with reference to the incidence of poverty in any particular year. It is
also the country with the lowest at-risk-of-poverty rate in 1997. In
other words, in Denmark both the risk of becoming poor and the risk
of remaining poor are rather low.
• At the other extreme we find France. In France almost one in five
persons faced the risk of poverty in 1997. More than half of these
had been in this state since 1994 – a significant proportion. Similar,
albeit not extreme, is the situation in the UK.
• In Italy but also Ireland the incidence of poverty risk at any particular
year is quite high – almost as high or even higher than in France or
the UK. Yet a much smaller fraction of those who were in a state of
poverty risk in 1997 had been poor since 1994.
• Germany, Austria and Belgium are the countries closest to the
European average. They all display average or below average
poverty risks at any particular year and likewise with the risk of
persistent poverty. The situation in these countries is not as good as
in Denmark but also not as bad as in France and the UK.
Entry and exit into poverty
Pathways to income poverty and social exclusion can be studied with
survey data through logistic regression. The variety of possible
explanatory circumstances and their interrelationships makes it
impossible to identify patterns solely on the basis of descriptive analysis.
In the EUROHOME-IMPACT study we pooled data for eight countries
(see tables 2 to 4 above) and included only those variables for which we
found a difference from the average entry risk which exceeded four
percentage points in a multivariate model.
The variables that were originally included in the logistic regression to
predict the propensity to fall into poverty were:
1. Demographic background variables (country, age and gender of main
earner)
2. Socio-economic characteristics of the household (household type,
work attachment and educational level)
EUROHOME-IMPACT FINAL REPORT 38