Eurostat released its latest Key Figures on European Living Conditions report on 20th October. It reported that 63% of Italian households struggle to make ends meet. Other statistics also made poor reading.
Italy is the only one among the large European countries (France, Germany and Spain) where the share of households which struggle to make ends meet in 2022 is above 63%, Eurostat said Saturday.
A breakdown by country shows how the percentage of households reporting at least some difficulty in making ends meet in 2022 varies from less than a quarter in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Luxembourg to 80.3% in Bulgaria and 89.6% in Greece.
Italy falls into this category – or at least 63% of the total – surpassing France, Poland, Spain and Portugal. The European average is 45.5%.
Details from the Eurostat report
In relative terms, 21.6 % of the population in the EU was at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2022. This share was slightly higher for females (22.7 %) than for males (20.4 %). Among the EU Member States, the highest shares of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2022 were recorded in Romania (34.4 %) and Bulgaria (32.2 %), while the lowest shares were in Slovenia (13.3 %) and Czechia (11.8 %). Italy’s percentage of the population at risk of poverty was higher than the EU average at 24.4%.
The Gini coefficient gives the extent to which the distribution of income within a country deviates from an equal distribution. A Gini value of 100 % means that only one person receives all the income in the country, while a Gini value of 0 % means that income is distributed equally across the whole population. Therefore, the lower the figure, the better the distribution.
In 2022, the Gini coefficient for the EU was 29.6 %. The highest income disparities among the EU Member States according to this indicator were recorded in Bulgaria (38.4 %), Lithuania (36.2 %), and Latvia (34.3 %). Income was most evenly distributed in Belgium (24.9 %), Czechia (24.8 %), Slovenia (23.1 %) and Slovakia (21.2 %). Again, Italy’s percentage was higher than the EU average sitting in the 30.5-33-5% range.
