According to a report by Statista, 94.6 million people in the EU – just over 21% of the population – will be at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2023.
This means that they live in households that face at least one of three risks: income poverty, severe material and social poverty, and/or living in a household with very low work intensity (where adults work less than 20% of their potential throughout the year).
According to Eurostat data, this figure remains relatively stable compared to the previous year (95.3 million in 2022, or 22% of the population).
As the accompanying infographic shows, the proportion of people at risk of poverty and social exclusion varies widely between EU countries. The EU countries with the highest rates last year were Romania (32%), Bulgaria (30%), Spain (26.5%) and Greece (26.1%), while the lowest rates were in the Czech Republic (12%), Slovenia (13.7%) and Finland (15.8%).
By comparison, Russia recently announced a “catastrophically low” birth rate of 1.4, well below the 2.1 needed to stabilize the population. But Ukraine's birth rate has plummeted to its lowest in 300 years as its population declines. These demographic problems are weighing on poverty levels in other ways.
As bne IntelliNews reports in its latest Despair Index (which adds unemployment, inflation and poverty rates), Russia is currently enjoying its highest Despair Index rating in modern history, with Eurostat reporting that the poverty rate has fallen from 21.7% in 2020 to just 9.3% in 2023, one of the lowest levels in Europe, Reuters reports.
Poverty is difficult to measure in Ukraine because few official statistics are collected due to the war, but Ukraine was already the poorest country in Europe before the war began. Just three months ago, the World Bank estimated that about one-third of the population today (29%, or about 9 million people) live below the poverty line. According to the World Bank, an estimated 1.8 million more Ukrainians have lived in poverty since 2020. The situation would be even worse if Ukraine had not received foreign aid to pay pensions and salaries.
