rivista italiana di economia demografia e statistica - Sieds

Rivista Italiana di Economia Demografia e Statistica Volume LXIII nn. 3-4 – Luglio-Dicembre 2009
SOCIAL EXCLUSION IN EUROPEAN REGIONS:
A MULTILEVEL LATENT CLASS MODEL
Elena Pirani
1. Modelling social exclusion
In recent years the term social exclusion has taken a prominent place in
discussions concerning social policies and inequalities, in all European countries.
Social exclusion is not only a negative condition per se, it also represents a
disruptive element for social and economic development, entailing the risk for
people to become excluded from the mainstream society. The fight against poverty
and social exclusion is one of the central objectives of the European Union, in a
context where the links between the economic and the social spheres are assuming
an increasing central importance. We propose a statistical framework to study
social exclusion considering at the same time both relational and distributional
aspects. The proposed hierarchical latent class model allows accounting for all
these elements, also in a subjective perspective, and considering the different
contexts in which individuals live and that may affect their perceptions.
In the literature, there is agreement in considering social exclusion a
multidimensional concept (e.g. Room 1995, Atkinson and Davoudi 2000, Peace
2001). Multidimensionality implies that deprivation and lack of resources
determining social exclusion have to refer to a broad set of quantitative and
qualitative factors. The relevance of the different elements of exclusion may be
different depending on the context, in term of time and place (Mayes et al. 2001,
Bhalla and Lapeyre 2004). Referring to the fifteen countries belonging to European
Union in 2001, we propose a conceptual model of social exclusion based on the
identification of three principal dimensions representing the spheres of human life
in which it is most important for individuals to participate: the economic, the social
and the institutional dimensions. These three dimensions refer to different areas of
human life that interact and influence reciprocally, and exclusion in one dimension
could determine or make worse exclusion in the others (Bhalla and Lapeyre 2004).
The economic dimension refers to monetary and financial aspects and, in a
broader sense, it includes the subject’s capability to access goods and services
market and the subject actual living conditions. The social dimension concerns
with the domain of relations among individuals. The relationship networks with
family, friends, neighbours, local community, and so on, may be viewed as forms
of social capital at individual level, that can be activated when necessary, thus